The value of that number has been debated almost from the day it was first calculated in the mid-1990s. The flaws of the official government rate are well known: It counts only full-time, first-time students who enroll in the fall, excluding those who transfer out of the institution or transfer in and eventually graduate.

But even if you ignore those flaws, questions remain about whether graduation rates should be used to judge the quality of an institution and, more important, considered by prospective students when they select a college. Despite these questions, a host of recently released consumer tools, including President Obama’s College Scorecard, are using graduation rates in just that way to help students weigh their college decision. What’s more, in a Pew Research Center survey of college presidents conducted with The Chronicle in 2011, campus leaders said graduation rates were the most effective indicator for the public to assess a college’s quality.

As the graduation rate is used more often as a proxy for quality, the debate over its effectiveness becomes more intense. Some college officials maintain that graduation rates are a poor predictor of student success because they don’t measure an individual student’s chance of success. In other words, we can’t send the same exact student to different colleges at the same time, so we have no idea if a student who ends up dropping out of a college with a low graduation rate wouldn’t have followed the same path at an institution with a high graduation rate.

In reporting my book on the future of higher ed over the past year and a half, I met many students who dropped out of college. That led me to keep returning to this question: Does the student make the institution or does the institution make the student?

It’s both, I learned, although depending on your measure of success, one of them is more important than the other. If graduating with a degree is the ultimate measure of success—and for most students it is—then getting the right match between a prospective student and a college is what matters most. That’s the foundation of the undermatching research by former Princeton president, William Bowen, and others. Bowen maintains that institutions are the more important player in that match because more-selective institutions do a better job at graduating all types of students, even those the admissions office may have worried about admitting in the first place.

Going to a college with a high graduation rate doesn’t guarantee that the student will get a degree, of course, but the so-called “peer effects” of being around other students who want to finish college make a significant difference. “There is evidence that schools with high graduation rates have a culture that encourages actually graduating,” says Mark Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research and former U.S. commissioner of education statistics.

Vincent Tinto, a leading expert on the subject and author of Completing College: Rethinking Institutional Action (University of Chicago Press), agrees that graduation rates speak to no one individual. Still, graduation rates are not all about the academic strength of students a college enrolls—as critics sometimes argue—because even institutions with similar selectivity in admissions have substantial differences in how well they graduate students.

The problem as he sees it is that in the current system individuals are unable to obtain the information they need to make informed decisions about the likelihood that someone like them might graduate from an institution they are considering.

He would like to see institutions publish more data on graduation rates by type of student. How well does the college graduate those with Pell Grants or who need remedial help? What are the graduation rates by major, or of students on Work-Study grants? “If institutions can’t tell you that information, then that is indicative that they are not focused on student success,” says Tinto, professor emeritus at Syracuse University.

There is no question the government needs to improve how it measures the graduation rate to capture more students, such as those who transfer colleges. That is why we need a national unit-record system that tracks students who are increasingly swirling through higher education. But even with the flaws in how it’s currently measured, a college’s graduation rate should play a role in the college-search process. As Tinto says “in the absence of any other data, it is only logical that a student would use college graduation rates as a way of judging an institution.  What else would they do?”

As just one measure of many, using the graduation rate to evaluate colleges is as useful as judging a car by its safety ratings. Sure, you don’t know if buying a specific car will keep you from having an accident, but at least you reduce the probability that you will be seriously hurt if you purchase a car with a higher safety rating. The same is true with colleges that do a good job in graduating their students.

One left Ohio University after a semester last fall, and the other dropped out of a performing-arts college in Los Angeles after two years. Both had accumulated debt. One of the former students was about to start work on a cruise ship, and the other hoped to perform on a cruise ship. Both had the same goal: to earn enough money to go back to college eventually.

Neither of the students quite knew why they had gone to college in the first place except that it was expected of them by parents and counselors. Both had done minimal research on the institutions they eventually selected. They didn’t pay much attention, if any, to the numbers they should have considered in making their choices: graduation rates, net prices, how much they would pay each month on their student loans, the default rate on loans, and how much they might earn after graduation.

Those numbers, when viewed together, give some indication to prospective students about how they might fare at a particular college. But higher-education officials find fault with several of the measures, especially judging a college based on the earnings of its graduates.

It’s worth remembering, though, that those debates are often led by elite colleges, which for the most part graduate students who go on to successful careers. Those colleges are not the types of places my two recent seatmates ever considered. They needed easy-to-use tools to figure out if a college was a good “financial fit” for them and to balance price with the likelihood of success.

Applying such financial metrics to higher education is often framed as trying to measure the “return on investment,” or ROI, of a college degree. Measuring a degree as you would a stock investment makes many academics cringe.

But supplying prospective students and their parents with information to balance what is now a very emotional decision is about more than just ROI. It’s about helping make better-informed choices on a range of questions: Is the least expensive college the best deal if I don’t graduate in four years? How does my monthly debt payment compare to my estimated earnings? What are the chances I’ll default on my loan?

The answers to those questions and more can be found in a new Web site, College Reality Check (collegerealitycheck.com), designed to help parents and students easily sort through the many factors they need to consider when choosing a college. Produced by The Chronicle with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the tool allows users to find out how individual colleges measure up on net price, graduation rates, debt, default rates, and graduate earnings. Users can compare up to five colleges from among the nearly 3,600 in the database at the same time.

College Reality Check is part of a new collection of consumer tools, released within the last several months, that put students on more of an even playing field with colleges, which know so much more about applicants during the admissions process. Along with the federal government’s College Scorecard and efforts in the states to link employment and college-graduation data, the new data tools offer critical information to students that perhaps will help ensure that they avoid colleges where they might drop out or take on too much debt.

As tuition prices and student debt continue to climb and data aggregation and visualization improve, the number and quality of those consumer tools will only increase. So in the long run, college officials who don’t like being judged on such measures might best focus on improving their numbers. My two seatmates in recent weeks deserve that much.

Most entrepreneurs from the 100-plus companies that pitched their ideas at the conference were too young to recall the ubiquitous shrink-wrapped CDs that helped AOL grow during the 1990s, but Case’s advice on change and innovation still found an audience among many of the twentysomethings in the room. Case’s core message perhaps carried even more significance for college leaders who are struggling with an unsustainable business model but who remained largely absent from this meeting.

To Case, the first Internet wave, which ended with the tech crash of 2001, was about building the infrastructure of the Web. The second wave, which we’re living through now, is focused on trying to improve the quality of life.

Of great interest to technology companies right now, Case said, is improving education. Here are my three takeaways for college leaders from what the former AOL leader said:

Focus less on invention, more on improvement. The companies that pitched their ideas here didn’t offer breakthrough products that made you say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Most of them improved on something someone else had already developed, confirming Case’s theory of the second Internet wave.

The conversation in the hallways and in several sessions during the summit was whether there is really anything left to invent in order to improve education. Sure there is, but much of the focus in the discussions here was about using the vast amounts of data we already collect on students to validate different teaching methods (such as online or hybrid) and design paths to a degree that personalize education in a way that ensures more students succeed (such as adaptive learning and competency-based degrees).

Don’t go it alone. Harnessing the power of big data is both mind-boggling and expensive for most colleges. Case talked about how technology companies often team up with others or license their products to share ideas and risk. But within higher ed, colleges are inherently competitive with one another and rarely like to cooperate, particularly on the academic side. But in order to improve how and what students learn in the future—and, in some cases, to survive—colleges must share resources like never before.

One model to emulate is the loose federations that Coursera and edX have created to develop MOOCs. Many institutions that are part of those two efforts to build massive open online courses still compete on every other front for students, faculty members, and money.

Build platforms for talent. All the smart people don’t work at your company, Case told the audience. The best companies, he said, are those that recognize talent comes in many shapes and sizes, and that make a home for all of those people, even if they aren’t employed by the company. With professors now reaching students directly through MOOCs or even their own universities, colleges are going to increasingly need to deal with professors who are free agents and have developed their own following. We’re already seeing this in the journalism and music industries, where newspapers and record labels are a lot less important to the success of writers and performers than they were in the past.

As future students move around the higher-ed system, gathering experiences and credits from multiple universities and other providers, they’ll pay less attention to brand names (except for the elite names). Colleges should worry less about who a professor works for and more about becoming the gathering place and platform for the best teachers.

Case thinks the education sector is only in the bottom of the first inning of a nine-inning game when it comes to the changes it will undergo. That’s probably little comfort to colleges that hope all this talk of change and innovation will just go away and we’ll return to the old days, when they owned the market and had almost unlimited pricing power.

The decision by the Education Department on Tuesday to clarify its rules and outline a process for providing federal aid to students enrolled in “competency-based” programs has potentially far-reaching consequences beyond just rethinking how colleges award credits based on what students actually know instead of time spent in a seat. It might mark the beginning of reimagining the entire academic calendar and providing much-needed flexibility for students to pursue opportunities outside of standard courses that help shape their undergraduate lives.

For now, the Education Department’s decision provides a lift to three traditional universities starting competency-based degree programs this year: Northern Arizona University, the University of Wisconsin system, and Southern New Hampshire University. In all three cases, the competency-based degrees are niche programs aimed at working adults, separate from the institutions’ undergraduate programs, which still base their credits on seat time.

But imagine an approach that allows traditional undergraduates to mix and match the two systems, moving seamlessly through courses where they know the material and focusing their time on courses where they don’t.

Breaking free from the tyranny of the academic calendar would allow students to take advantage of study abroad, apprenticeships, undergraduate research, and other experiences that colleges repeatedly say they value but give little time in a structured degree program for students to pursue.

Already a few campuses are experimenting with shorter semesters interspersed with traditional 15-week semesters. Arizona State University, for instance, has increased its share of 7½-week courses to provide an option for students who have finished shorter online courses and would otherwise have to wait until the next semester if they wanted to take a face-to-face course.

The shorter semester also helps remedial students at Arizona State who are using adaptive-learning software to complete work at their own pace. When I visited the Tempe campus, in the middle of October, about half the students in the remedial mathematics class I saw had already completed the course. Some of those students filled out the remaining time in the fall semester with a 7½-week course. Given that the typical college classroom is used only 40 percent of the time, squeezing in more courses also helps reduce costs.

In competency-based programs, student learning is assessed through tests, portfolios, clinical observations, and other measurements of knowledge. Of course, mixing and matching that system with one based on seat time would be difficult, and perhaps impossible, unless the two sides agreed on common outcomes.

“If we all work from common outcomes,” says Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, “we won’t have to care where or how students addressed those outcomes as long as they are well developed, agreed upon, and backed with rigorous assessments.”

His team is already exploring an outcome-based system that would allow students to move from the competency-based program to the university’s traditional 16-week semester to its eight-week online format as they needed or desired.

The guidance the Education Department issued on Tuesday doesn’t allow such mixing and matching, at least for now. But if that day comes, we can begin rethinking the traditional calendar in such a way that has real potential to benefit students, improve learning, and  reduce costs.

In the nonprofit sector of higher ed, profit is often measured by prestige. The drive for prestige often clouds the judgment of trustees and presidents, leading them to veer from their mission and, for the last decade or so, to go on a spending spree to keep up with the Joneses in terms of campus amenities or try to climb in the various rankings.

Most presidents will say they don’t care about rankings. They just did so again in a forthcoming survey of campus executives, conducted by The Chronicle, in which presidents put improved U.S. News & World Report rankings dead last in a list of measures by which they judge their success.

But that message obviously hasn’t filtered down to their PR officers, who bombard the news media with press releases each fall, when the U.S. News rankings are released, or their marketing teams, which stuff this publication and others with advertising right around the time U.S. News sends its reputation survey to college leaders.

Maybe it’s because presidents are conflicted about the prestige race. In the same Chronicle survey, presidents said strengthening the reputation of their institution mattered to their success. Left unsaid, of course, is how they measure such strengthening if not by rankings, and not just the much-maligned U.S. News survey.

Presidents also think prestige plays an outsize role in how successful their graduates are in the job market. In the survey, they said a college’s reputation is the most important factor in a graduate’s résumé.

What’s interesting about the presidents’ take on reputation is that employers completely disagree with it. In a survey of employers that The Chronicle released last week in conjunction with American Public Media’s Marketplace, those who hire ranked a college’s reputation last on a list of criteria used to evaluate job candidates. They thought internships were most important. Of course, employers are also conflicted about the reputation issue since some large companies send recruiters only to top colleges and universities.

For many institutions, the prestige race is a losing battle. If I counted the number of presidents who have said over the years that they wanted to move into the top tier of some ranking, you’d find 50 colleges trying to fit into 20 spots. The truth is that the list of the best colleges and universities in the United States has remained virtually unchanged for the last century. That’s certainly the case if you look at the history of the U.S. News rankings.

Yet there was Florida State University last month announcing a five-year, $75-million plan to move into the top 25 of public universities in the U.S. News rankings.

The issue is whether much of American higher education can afford to continue to play the prestige game when many small private colleges are going broke and public colleges are seeing their share of instructional dollars from the states shrink, putting more of the cost of education on the backs of students.

In the current financial environment, experimentation is needed and differentiation is rewarded. MOOCs resulted from experiments in teaching at Stanford University and, a year and half later, are beginning to show that colleges that fail to differentiate their offerings, especially large introductory lecture courses, face real threats.

Competency-based education is the next experiment, as the University of Wisconsin, Northern Arizona University, and Southern New Hampshire University try to differentiate their offerings to serve a population hungry for higher education.

Historically, the prestige race doesn’t reward different in higher ed. Much like on Wall Street when companies go private in order to rebuild themselves for the long term, we need a new kind of prestige race in higher ed to deal with challenges of the next decade.

The piece, which generated more than a thousand comments from readers, quoted mostly graduates of regional public universities in Georgia and for-profit colleges. It illustrated that, despite the rhetoric from those advocating more “high-quality postsecondary credentials,” we have come to think of this national goal as just about four-year degrees and have clearly not defined what we mean by quality credentials.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not in the camp of the “Don’t Go to College” crowd that is popular in some circles these days. But without high-quality training and apprenticeship programs as real alternatives to those ill-suited for college—at least, college immediately after high school—many higher-education institutions have become de facto job-training centers, and high-priced ones at that.

Indeed, training students seems to keep some traditional colleges in business, as they turn the latest hot career fields into the newest college majors. Colleges, particularly four-year institutions, have marketed their practical academic programs in a way to raise demand for more of them. Since 2000, the overall number of academic programs at colleges and universities has grown by 21 percent, according to figures the U.S. Education Department tracks for various surveys.

One-third of those new programs in the last decade were added in just two broad fields: health professions (where credential inflation is rampant) and military technologies/applied sciences (probably a reaction to the September 11th attacks). The 1990s saw similar growth in the number of majors. Indeed, nearly four in 10 majors in the Education Department data didn’t exist in 1990.

Any of us would recognize those new majors by just glancing at the list of undergraduate programs at almost any college these days: sustainability, athletic training, sports management, new media, gaming, homeland security, and so on. This trend, which has persisted for five decades, has been bemoaned by some as a flight from the arts and sciences to the practical arts.

The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in traditional arts-and-sciences fields (English, mathematics, and biology, for example) has tumbled from almost half of the undergraduate credentials awarded in 1968 to 26 percent in 2010. A majority of credentials today are conferred in occupational or vocational areas, such as business, education, and communications. The most popular undergraduate major is business.

Since 2006, first-year students have told researchers that the No. 1 reason to attend college is to “get a better job.” That’s largely the reason many four-year colleges are adding narrowly tailored majors as fast as they can.

But despite having majored in the latest career fields, it seems that some graduates of those programs are finding it difficult to land a job (a few of the people quoted in the Times story had narrow majors). Maybe that’s why colleges don’t want to be measured by how well they place students in jobs.

Meanwhile, top business executives in various surveys and interviews say they like workers who are creative, are adaptable, and have the ability to communicate and think critically—all telltale signs of a classic liberal education.

We know the future economy needs more Americans with a high-quality education after high school. But that training comes in many forms. Several four-year colleges operate co-op programs coupled with a liberal education, for example, preparing their graduates to launch their careers. A handful of professional majors at four-year institutions, engineering and nursing, for instance, are packed with intensive courses.

There is certainly a place for purely practical training programs within our broader goal to be first in the world in an educated work force, but the question increasingly should be whether all of those programs need to be housed at expensive four-year colleges.

Critics of MOOCs have emerged just as quickly, with some of the biggest naysayers mocking the idea that a supersize lecture course could be considered innovative. Others simply worry about the impact of MOOCs on no-name institutions without deep pockets or superstar professors.

Lost in the debate is that the MOOC phenomenon is an important evolutionary moment, not a revolutionary moment, for the future of higher ed. When any sector of the economy undergoes sweeping change—just as higher ed is experiencing now—every new development feels like a major turning point.

But in hindsight, what we think of as big moments at the time often turn out to be just blips in the life cycle of an industry. Does anyone remember MOOs? Those Multiple-user Object-Oriented environments, which allowed simultaneous users to communicate with one another online, were cutting edge in the mid-1990s.

In talking with two pioneers of the MOOC movement this week, I was reminded that we didn’t just wake up one day and Coursera had 2.5 million students, 215 courses, and 33 college and university partners (although it might seem that way).

At Stanford University, for instance, ideas to sharply upgrade the experience of online courses and make them free to the world had actually been gathering steam for several years among a small group of faculty members in the computer-science department. Andrew Ng had posted online 10 of Stanford’s most popular engineering courses, at no charge, in 2008. A year later, Daphne Koller started to experiment with short video clips and embedded quizzes to improve online learning, eventually using the materials in place of her face-to-face classes, where attendance became optional.

Indeed, MOOCs have already evolved from when they entered our daily lexicon, in the fall of 2011, as have the business models of the providers. “We have started to put revenue models in place because our university partners are a little worried about this,” Koller said. “They want to make sure this is not a drain on their resources. And frankly, we want to stop the criticisms in the media that this is not sustainable.”

In trying to pin down one solution to all of higher ed’s problems, we seem to have forgotten that one promise of MOOCs was that they would allow professors to experiment with pedagogical methods on a vast scale. In other words, we would learn more about how students learn by collecting data on them, tens of thousands of students at a time.

Already the introduction of the massive courses has resulted in efforts to rethink how we deliver classroom instruction. Take a test about to start at Syracuse University, where Jeffrey Stanton, a professor in the School of Information Studies, is taking the “M” out of MOOC and limiting enrollment in a forthcoming online course on big data. The class will be limited to 500 people.

“We wanted to focus on the quality of the student experience and peer interaction,” he said. But he also wanted a big-enough cohort to understand the different types of students interested in the emerging field of data science and the backgrounds of those students that lead to successful outcomes. Teaching the typical online class of 40 students simply wouldn’t produce a rich-enough sample.

The “OOC” shows that enterprising professors who are deeply committed to improving learning are already rethinking their courses and advancing ideas rather than just dismissing MOOCs as a fad.

At the same time, however, those evolutionary steps recognize that incremental change has a place in the discussion about higher ed’s future. Teresa Sullivan, president of the University of Virginia, advocated such “incremental change” last summer as she battled the university’s Board of Visitors after they tried to oust her for not moving fast enough to position the institution for the future. Many presidents and boards right now are in a hurry to write new blueprints for their institutions, fearing the end is near.

The sky is not falling, as one Chronicle contributor pointed out this week. While I’m not as sanguine on higher ed’s financial well-being as is Robert Sternberg of Oklahoma State University, colleges and universities have a little time to experiment and watch as the future evolves rather than envelopes them overnight.

The problem is, there is no traditional learner anymore. What’s more, we no longer even have a common definition of “higher education.” The lack of consensus about what the higher-education system in the United States should be producing is largely to blame for the pressures facing colleges and universities today, from lagging financial support to proving their value to students and parents.

We desperately need some sort of rallying cry, akin to the post-World War II period of the GI Bill, the late-1950s space race, or the introduction of the modern financial-aid programs with the first Higher Education Act, in 1965. The lack of consensus, which dates back several decades now, has resulted in a lack of public support for higher education, especially public colleges and universities.

Take flagship institutions, for example. As those campuses have relied less on public subsidies, their missions have shifted, especially when it comes to the number of in-state residents they serve.

President Obama has attempted to start a national dialogue by calling for the United States to lead the world in its proportion of people with college credentials. While getting students to complete a degree or certificate rather than just accumulate credits is a worthy goal, simply pushing more people through colleges and universities is not the definition of a successful higher-education system in the minds of most experts.

What is needed to truly serve the students of the future—and where state and federal leaders could really lend a hand—is to make the system more flexible for the next generation of learners and the institutions that serve them.

Despite all the talk about how today’s traditional student is yesterday’s nontraditional student, we still have a financial-aid and regulatory system built on a one-size-fits-all model, with 15-week semesters and credit based on time spent in a classroom seat. As a result, it is difficult for institutions to consider new ways of serving the diverse needs of today’s students.

My concern with all the news-media attention MOOCs are getting right now is that it is crowding out informed discussions of other innovative solutions to improve learning and control costs. One model that is getting scant attention, for instance, despite growing interest from traditional universities, is competency-based degrees.

This year three traditional universities—Northern Arizona, Southern New Hampshire, and the Wisconsin system—are experimenting with degrees based on competencies. Officials at all three institutions believe a program based on what a student knows rather than seat time is the only way to begin clearing the logjam of time-pressed adults who need a postsecondary education. Building the programs, however, has required those officials to work alongside their accreditors and the Education Department to get around a myriad of rules.

Those rules, of course, are designed to protect students and attach integrity to a college degree. But surely we can build a system that is both flexible and accountable. Otherwise there is little incentive for college leaders to follow a different path than the institutions ahead of them, or to look radically different.

“Our students have all the information that we have as professors,” says Aaron Brower, special assistant to the president of the University of Wisconsin system (and a professor on the Madison campus). “So there is no premium on access to information.”

Indeed, the whole notion of how students acquire information, toggling between devices and sources and working collaboratively, has transformed the learning process. The question now is how to build an educational system around this new information ecosystem. “It gives us the chance to put learning outcomes first and provides the opportunity for individual instruction,” Brower says.

It also gives us the chance to build consensus around a diverse higher-education system that is flexible and responsive—yet accountable—to a generation of learners where one mode of teaching no longer fits all and where face-to-face, hybrid, and online-only education can perhaps peacefully coexist.

Gavin Newsom at UCLA. (Todd Cheney)

You won’t often find the lieutenant governor of a state at a higher-ed conference, but there was Gavin Newsom of California sitting next to me on Tuesday at UCLA for a discussion about how online learning might help the state’s cash-starved public colleges increase access. He wasn’t there just for a photo-op. He stayed basically the entire day and took notes. A lot of them, and on the subject (I looked). He rarely glanced down at his phone.

The meeting was another in a series of what seem like weekly gatherings on the subject of innovation in higher ed. At most of those meetings, I’m struck by some important constituency that is not represented. Most of the time it’s the faculty. Sometimes it’s lawmakers or trustees. And other times it’s students, especially the students who will be arriving on college campuses in the next few years.

But the organizers of this symposium, the Twenty Million Minds Foundation, succeeded more than most at getting all the key voices in the room, from the various innovation movements (MOOCs, competency-based degrees, open learning, prior learning, and new higher-ed providers), the faculty unions, the academic senates, politicians, college presidents, and finally, actual live students.

Now that we have the right players at the table, we just need to get them to talk with one another instead of at one another. At times the discussion on Tuesday reminded me of the fiscal talks in Washington. Everyone acknowledges there is a problem, but no one wants to give one inch on their proposed solution or on their opposition to some other fix. It’s just easier to keep talking and kicking the can down the road for someone else to deal with some day.

That day is quickly coming for higher ed. Six in 10 colleges and universities face balance sheets with flat or declining net-tuition revenue. That’s the cash they have to spend after giving out financial aid.

In California, which enrolls one out of nine American students, the fiscal situation seems to go from bad to worse every month. One of the biggest complaints from students on a panel was that they can’t get the classes they need to graduate or even the prerequisites for other classes that do have room. A student from Sonoma State University said she has friends who are losing their financial aid and housing because they can’t get enough courses to stay enrolled full time. To them online classes are vital.

Among my key takeaways from the day that could form the basis for both sides to come to some agreement:

There is no one solution. Every college is looking for the silver-bullet solution to fix all of its problems. One fear I have about all the press the MOOCs are getting these days is that it is overshadowing good work being done by others who were at the conference, namely Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative and the University of Wisconsin’s new flex-degree option.

Even a leader of the MOOC movement agrees. “The MOOC as the solution for everything is just wrong,” said Sebastian Thrun, Udacity’s founder. “People matter, instructors matter. It’s not just a computer system that matters.” That said, faculty members pointed out that they are constantly bombarded with a “dizzying array of options” for the future and no clear path forward. There is no one solution, but there can’t be a hundred solutions either.

We need more research. Many agreed more research is needed on student learning in a digital age. Daphne Koller of Coursera suggested higher ed could take a page from the corporate world and do more A/B testing online to figure out what engages students. The question remains of who will pay for such research.

Perhaps the federal government could revive the original purpose of the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, which was intended to scale innovation in higher education. Once that research is done, it needs to get into the hands of the right people, it needs to be believed, and everyone needs to agree that sometimes we should move forward without every last piece of evidence.

What is higher education? We tend to romanticize what happens on a college campus these days to fit a vision of higher ed from a generation ago. Yet today’s students no longer fit that mold, and they are often forgotten in this debate. The rhetoric of both sides (administrator vs. faculty, tech vs. anti-tech) perpetuates the stereotypes of academe.

Bob Samuels, president of the University Council-American Federation of Teachers, said the move online was not being driven by the faculty. “We are being invaded by these outside forces,” he said. Perhaps higher ed needs its version of the No Labels group, which is a movement in Congress of Democrats, Republicans, and independents to cross party lines to solve problems.

The UCLA conference was a good start. It got the right people in the room. But enough of the talk at these conferences. Now the two sides need to come to a consensus on a path forward. Maybe they should borrow an idea from Phil Regier of Arizona State University Online. He has forged a pact with his faculty that if professors don’t think their online course is better than the face-to-face version, they can go back to the old way. So far, he said, no one has taken him up on the offer.

• Face-to-face education is the established and verified mode of instruction, and any other way depersonalizes education, is uncontrolled, and most of all, is ineffective.
• Using technology to supplement and, in some cases, replace face-to-face instruction helps personalize learning for students, focuses classroom time on what they haven’t already mastered, and most important, meets students where and how they learn today. As a result, traditional brick-and-mortar colleges are doomed.

As usual with almost any policy debate these days, very few commenters were trying to forge a middle ground, which is desperately needed in an age of rising costs, declining public subsidies, and new ways of delivering courses.

We should be concerned about the impact of changes in higher ed if the outcome is that high-quality traditional colleges are reserved only for the wealthy and gifted. But the tone of many comments was that traditional colleges and face-to-face instruction are of high quality, while everything else is not, or at least is unproven.

Some of the biggest skeptics of online learning see it as the modern equivalent of the correspondence course, a second-rate alternative for students too far from a physical campus.

It’s worth noting, however, that we tend to romanticize what happens on college campuses, including the actual learning that occurs in traditional classrooms. Faculty in the past gathered students in a classroom to either lecture them or lead a discussion because there weren’t many alternatives. And despite the various learning styles of students today and the new tools to reach them, some professors still teach the same way they did 10 or 20 years ago.

Last spring, Ithaca S+R, the research service of the nonprofit group Ithaka, which promotes the use of technology in education, released the results of a study that found students learned just as much in the hybrid format of a statistics course at six public universities as they would have in a traditional version of the course.

In releasing the study’s findings, William G. Bowen, a former president of Princeton University and an architect of the research, said “the most important single result” was that “it calls into question the position of the skeptic who says, ‘I don’t want to try this because it will hurt my students.’”

Such words could carry significant weight, coming from a former president of Princeton. Higher education is organized by prestige, and the relentless drive to move up a level remains one of the biggest barriers to change.

Prestige and quality are often conflated, and the ambiguous definition of exactly what prestige means in higher education leads colleges to focus on the input measures—which students they accept and how much they spend—valued by the various rankings.

What’s more, faculty members and researchers want to work at institutions like the places where they were trained, so the race for prestige leads institutions to spend more of their own dollars on research in the hope of securing more federal dollars or, if they’re really ambitious, snagging an invitation to the exclusive club—the Association of American Universities.

In the end, this race leads institutions to be risk averse, to innovate only on the edges, and for those who can’t afford to compete, to take on large amounts of debt to look like everyone else. After all, who wants to follow a different path than the colleges ahead of them or to look radically different?

Sure, some of what’s talked about as saving higher education in the future is hype and will be abandoned in a few years, as many of the commenters on the Chronicle article noted. But carving a path that diverges from the well-worn route toward prestige doesn’t necessarily mean the new course is of lesser quality.