Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/80527
A pple's move had been anticipated ever since its archrival had launched the GoogleMBA. "We just realized one day we had all the ingredients," CEO Larry Page had explained. "Great content on YouTube, vast library catalogs and access to academic papers through GoogleBooks and GoogleScholar, tools for distributed collaboration via GoogleDocs, live communication through gtalk, a tool for organizing networks called Google+, and most important, an algorithm to figure out what students find most useful." To many, this was the most revolutionary aspect of the GoogleMBA. Since the firm tracked how students navigated through the available material, the MBA dynamically adapted—giv- ing more prominence to video lectures that had received more visits, for example, and proposing follow-up exercises based on where previous users had clicked most often. This way, the more students joined the program, the better the experience became. Business schools had competed hard to have their faculty placed high on Google's lists, hoping this would entice viewers to enroll in their traditional programs. But fewer and fewer did. Because what really made the GoogleMBA a game changer was the fact that it was completely free. This is usually when I wake up. What a terrible nightmare! Here is an inconvenient truth, though: For just about anybody outside the nar- row circle of business school deans, MBA directors, business faculty, staff, and supporting organizations that comprise our ecosystem, this scenario is incredibly exciting. As consumers, we have all benefited tremendously from Google and Apple innovations, including their transformation of entire value chains. But the notion that they also could transform the business educa- tion industry is terrifying, at least to us. Here's the good news for those of us in business education: To my knowledge, neither Apple nor Google is planning to launch an MBA. And the bad news? Just because they won't doesn't mean we can sit on our hands. 20 September/October 2012 BizEd Possibly the most powerful voice forecasting change in education is Clayton Christensen. In his book Disrupting Class, he predicts that technology will radically trans- form how education is delivered. But that's only one of the factors poised to reshape higher education. Others are equally sweeping: global debt, demographic change, rapid urbanization, natural resource con- straints, and the geographic shift of economic power. No doubt these agents of macro change will restructure the oppor- tunities for businesses over the next decade. But they have similarly broad implications for manage- ment education. I believe that each driver of change has the potential to cripple schools and programs— and the equal potential to bring about renewal, transformation, and new value creation. Global Debt Over the past decade, private and public debt has exploded around the developed world. Some scary statistics are provided in a report from the McKinsey Global Insti- tute, "Debt and deleveraging: The global credit bubble and its eco- nomic consequences" by Charles Roxburgh and co-authors. In the U.S., for example, public debt has more than tripled since 2002; in Japan, public debt per capita stands at a shocking US$87,600. In 2011, combined private and public debt in Japan and the U.K. had reached more than four times annual GDP. Overall debt levels averaged between 300 percent and 350 percent of GDP in Spain, South Korea, Switzerland, France, Italy, and the U.S. While debt has ballooned, average tuition at top universities and business schools has grown between two and three times faster than inflation. An MBA no longer costs the equivalent of a midsize family sedan; increasingly, it's a top-of-the-line sports car. And who can afford it? Governments are cutting back financial support for universities, banks are shrink- ing their student loan portfolios, and corporations are slashing their financial support for employees' business studies. Even leaving aside questions about whether we are pricing our programs beyond the reach of most of the population, the simultaneous increase of debt and tuition signifies a brewing storm. Of the ten countries that produce the most GMAT test takers, eight of them are considered heavily indebted by The Economist, which