Originally posted on LinkedIn
➡️ Diagnosis #2️⃣ from my ~80 conversations with education experts: Traditional Higher Education is systematically slow 🐌 to change. It’s changing, yes — but at a pace far slower than the world around it.
The many issues that have caused the higher education crisis are 𝑵𝒐 𝑺𝒆𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒕 to universities. They know they move slowly. But they can’t do much about it: they’re in a straitjacket.
▶️ Main reason: Legislation. The laws governing Higher Education are far more restrictive than those for preschools or K–12. And the compliance processes are brutal: making changes to their programs requires processes that take YEARS 🤯. Sector experts like Claudiandrea Urbina Trujillo and Natalia Ariza Ramírez describe the pain of a growing queue of thousands of accreditation registries waiting for approval — needed for every single program. By the time the bureaucratic process is done, the innovative program may already be obsolete 😵💫
▶️ Reason 2: Institutional inertia. Universities have institutional governance mechanisms that prevent quick reaction. Professors have few incentives to spend time updating their content. Committees and boards — academic, student, faculty — make meaningful change extremely bureaucratic. Mauricio Toro Orjuela tells me how many of these bodies can sometimes actively obstruct the most disruptive initiatives rather than support them.
▶️ Reason 3: The financial crisis. Most higher education institutions’ financial models depend heavily on funders like ICETEX, which is now in trouble. On top of that, there are fewer students every year, and fewer of the existing ones believe in higher education anymore. This has put universities in survival mode, leaving little room to innovate. The “lighter” and more diversified ones survive and thrive (as Caro González Tabares from CESA and José Leonardo Valencia Molano from Fundación Universitaria del Area Andina noted), but institutions that depended heavily on large-scale undergrad programs are in financial trouble.
🤔 Is it possible to have an educational institution that can move faster — at the speed of the modern world? Maybe one with a more manageable scale, a corporate governance model and culture more friendly to change, or operating under a more flexible regulatory regime? If so — what would that look like?