- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Frontispiece
- Foreword: Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century
- Preface
- I What We Teach and Why
- 1 Why We Need a New Kind of Higher Education
- 2 Practical Knowledge
- 3 Foundations of the Curriculum
- 4 A New Look at General Education
- 5 Multimodal Communications and Effective Communication
- 6 Formal Analyses and Critical Thinking
- 7 Empirical Analyses and Creative Thinking
- 8 Complex Systems and Effective Interaction
- 9 A New Look at Majors and Concentrations
- II How We Teach
- 10 Unlearning to Learn
- 11 The Science of Learning: Mechanisms and Principles
- 12 Fully Active Learning
- 13 A New Team-Teaching Approach to Structured Learning
- 14 Teaching from Lesson Plans
- 15 The Active Learning Forum
- 16 Building Lesson Plans for Twenty-First-Century Active Learning
- 17 Assessing Student Learning
- III Creating a New Institution
- 18 Building a New Brand
- 19 Global Outreach: Communicating a New Vision
- 20 An Admissions Process for the Twenty-First Century
- 21 Multifaceted Acculturation: An Immersive, Community-Based Multicultural Education
- 22 Experiential Learning: The City as a Campus and Human Network
- 23 A Global Community by Design
- 24 Mental Health Services in a Diverse, Twenty-First-Century University
- 25 The Minerva Professional Development Agency
- 26 Accreditation: Official Recognition of a New Vision of Higher Education
- 27 A Novel Business and Operating Model
- Afterword: For the Sake of the World
- Appendix A: Habits of Mind and Foundational Concepts
- Appendix B: Mission, Principles, and Practices
- Editors and Contributors
- Index
A Novel Business and Operating Model
A Novel Business and Operating Model
- Chapter:
- (p.363) 27 A Novel Business and Operating Model
- Source:
- Building the Intentional University
- Author(s):
Ben Nelson
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
Undergraduate education is rarely viewed from a business model perspective. University budgets are notorious for intermingling costs associated with graduate and undergraduate instruction, research, campus upkeep, administration, sports, and other endeavors. Tracking costs is made particularly difficult because the institution, for the sake of efficiency, wants to utilize its assets across several lines of business. For example, a lecture hall may be filled by undergraduates in the morning, graduate students in the afternoon and rented out to a student club for an event in the evening. Rather than trying to solve how to allocate those costs more effectively, Minerva is built around an operational philosophy of direct accountability. Three underlying principles allow us to succeed: First, where the market provides an efficient alternative, utilize that alternative rather than creating our own. Second, dollars paid by a constituent should not subsidize activities that are not in the service of that constituent. Third, natural incentives should be aligned only with successful delivery of the mission—incentives that encourage discriminatory behavior, reduction in quality of instruction, lowering of admission standards, or any other non-mission-aligned activity carry with them substantial inherent penalties that always outweigh any potential rewards.
Keywords: costs of higher education, administrative overhead, collegiate athletic costs, tenure, higher education business models, tuition funded research
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Frontispiece
- Foreword: Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century
- Preface
- I What We Teach and Why
- 1 Why We Need a New Kind of Higher Education
- 2 Practical Knowledge
- 3 Foundations of the Curriculum
- 4 A New Look at General Education
- 5 Multimodal Communications and Effective Communication
- 6 Formal Analyses and Critical Thinking
- 7 Empirical Analyses and Creative Thinking
- 8 Complex Systems and Effective Interaction
- 9 A New Look at Majors and Concentrations
- II How We Teach
- 10 Unlearning to Learn
- 11 The Science of Learning: Mechanisms and Principles
- 12 Fully Active Learning
- 13 A New Team-Teaching Approach to Structured Learning
- 14 Teaching from Lesson Plans
- 15 The Active Learning Forum
- 16 Building Lesson Plans for Twenty-First-Century Active Learning
- 17 Assessing Student Learning
- III Creating a New Institution
- 18 Building a New Brand
- 19 Global Outreach: Communicating a New Vision
- 20 An Admissions Process for the Twenty-First Century
- 21 Multifaceted Acculturation: An Immersive, Community-Based Multicultural Education
- 22 Experiential Learning: The City as a Campus and Human Network
- 23 A Global Community by Design
- 24 Mental Health Services in a Diverse, Twenty-First-Century University
- 25 The Minerva Professional Development Agency
- 26 Accreditation: Official Recognition of a New Vision of Higher Education
- 27 A Novel Business and Operating Model
- Afterword: For the Sake of the World
- Appendix A: Habits of Mind and Foundational Concepts
- Appendix B: Mission, Principles, and Practices
- Editors and Contributors
- Index
