“It’s cool to be a drop out these days.“ ... “It’s the dying companies that value college degrees. You have to think beyond that piece of paper.”

-> A College Education on the Cheap? Tech Start-Ups Take on Higher Ed is a short read from CNBC.com. The reporter speaks with Sebastian Thrun of Udacity (formerly of Stanford) and Eren Bali of Udemy. Toward the end of the interview, Thrun makes the point that—education aside—what these large, freely offered MOOC-type course offerings may do really well is act as a search engine for intellectual and creative talent that might otherwise never have a chance to be recognized:

“It’s not necessarily about educating, but discovering,” Thrun says, “We can reach and then develop talent that most universities cannot.”

Hmm. MITx may well be MIT’s way of doing the same thing. What do you think? 

Related opportunity. Note that the theme of the January–March 2013 issue of Planning for Higher Education will be Change-Disruption. If you know of someone who could write credibly about these topics throughout a campus’ integrated planning processes, or from a unique perspective, please suggest authors to Planning’s managing editor, claire.turcotte@scup.org. We’ll be looking for articles, planning stories, bloggers, and more. Insights as to what these MOOCs and new for-profit enterprises might do to our planning environment are welcome.

Sheila Croucher studies nations and nationalism. She sees strong parallels between "academic disciplines and departments in universities, on the one hand, and modern nation-states in the international system, on the other," and writes in this essay about how consideration of those parallels might be helpful in making institutional change happen. This thought-provoking piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education is a must-read. Unfortunately, you may find that you need either a subscription or to purchase a day pass to get at the entirety of it.

No blood has been or, one hopes, will be shed over questions of university restructuring. Still, some of the discourse about disciplinary identity and departmental belonging—how they might be threatened by possible institutional change, and why both must be preserved at all costs—can sound primordial. We know, even more clearly than we do with nations, that academic disciplines and departments are inventions. They have been constructed in specific historical contexts and shaped by specific sociopolitical, economic, and institutional circumstances.

But we also know, as with nation-states, that many people care deeply about their disciplinary identities and departmental belonging, and that many of the leaders of what we might call "academic nation-states" will endeavor to protect and promote their constituencies—often appropriately so. At my institution, the College of Arts and Science is engaging in a process of restructuring, and in the early weeks of our discussions, fear seemed rampant. Smaller departments hunkered down, anticipating annexation by larger ones with allegedly imperial ambitions, and some chairs heroically proclaimed their commitment to defend the borders of the department of X. Even departments with histories of dysfunction were loath to explore the possibility of reorganization. Some chairs and faculty members assumed that departmental reorganization would lead to the dissolution of disciplines. Others offered ideas for innovative curricular or pedagogical change, but those ideas typically resided within the departmental boundaries.

Philip Altbach is noted in this Chronicle of Higher Education article for saying that Manipal's uniqueness is that its plans essentially make large-scale globalization of higher education into a different animal, broadening the current circumstances where the US and the UK rule basically everything. It is something new - an institution "born in a developing country and focusing on students in other developing nations."

Manipal studies potential markets carefully. Places with a large South Asian population get close consideration since families are likely to have heard of the university. The company also wants to enter markets with a growing, aspirational middle class. Mr. Sudarshan says he is focusing now on emerging markets in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Africa.

Finally, Manipal's officials look for places where there is a demand for Manipal's core expertise: medicine and engineering.

"It is not risky for us; it is taking advantage of our capability," says Mr. Sudarshan of the company's expansionist strategy.

 Click on the title, A New Kind of Global University, to access the resource described above.