President's Letter

The silos and conventions of college and of primary and secondary education have not evolved fundamentally in hundreds of years. It is no secret that the education system is under great pressure to change. But numerous obstacles remain at every level, from tortuous academic publishing requirements for tenure to unreasonable union demands to paralyzed legislators. A recent McKinsey paper points out that “only six in ten students at four-year institutions are graduating within six years today. Most employers say graduates lack the skills they need. Tuition has risen far faster than inflation or household earnings for two decades”1 (a painful truth I am experiencing firsthand). This is leaving many with tremendous debt and even more questions about the value of education in the twenty-first century. Time to redesign. The recent excitement around massive open online courses (MOOCs) has yielded little beyond hype at this point—with a few notable exceptions, like Salman Khan's Khan Academy, which has transformed classroom learning by delivering video lectures at home and using the classroom for interactive coaching and workshop-style applied learning that makes teachers more valuable and the peer-to-peer learning connection more personal. (That sounds like an interesting recipe for design and business education, as well.) Underneath his thousands of online lectures is a beautiful software platform that some courageous school systems are now using to track progress and improve learning performance. A perfect combination of the promise of high-tech, high-touch experiences we have always heard about. This issue is dedicated to those brave souls who are taking on the establishment, overturning industrial-era assumptions, and challenging us all to become a more open and creative society capable of placing our children ahead of our biases. We have the good fortune to hear from some global innovators, including Arnold Wasserman, who has been working with governments from Singapore to Colombia to make education more creative. We also hear about some important work by the Design Learning Network (which we can all join) and about how some traditional schools are using design thinking to drive continuous improvement. We spoke to innovators at Harvard Business School, as well as the Olin College of Engineering, which boasts a 99 percent graduation rate, nearly twice that of most of its engineering peers. This challenge has driven DMI to embark upon a research program to map the future needs of design management and design thinking and graduate design education through a series of conversations with students and thought leaders from business, engineering, and education. These conversations began in 2013 in North America and will continue in 2014 and beyond with workshops around the world. It has been exciting to see the innovation developing globally from the sustained experiments at Toronto's Rotman School of Management, at Stanford's d.school, at Finland's Aalto University, and from newer players, such as Philadelphia University. The University of Cincinnati continues to offer its multi-layered programs, while such art schools as The New School and the California College of the Arts have designed their own unique DMBA curricula. The role of employers in redesigning professional education is already attracting huge investments by global corporations, and the need for schools to rethink their business models has become urgent. To quote McKinsey's André Dua, “The cost–value equation will shift so rapidly in the years ahead, and employers will develop so great a stake in the new system they help design, that millions of students will probably flourish without ever setting foot on traditional campuses.”2 This is why DMI is working with business schools and our global community to design the kind of education we need for the future. We invite you to sign up to join or host a conversation by emailing me at [email protected]. I would like to thank the entire team that has contributed to the DMI:futurED research and dialogue, especially our co-chairs: Craig Vogel, associate dean at the University of Cincinnati; Heather Fraser of Rotman DesignWorks and Vuka Innnovation; and Dianne Hardin, MDES candidate at the University of Cincinnati.

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