Clayton Christensen: Half of universities will fail in 10 years

Christensen is known for having coined the term "disruptive innovation". The expression appears in his book of 1997, "The Innovator's Dilemma", that in Brazil received the title of The Dilemma of the Innovation. Since then, he has been studying how technology and innovations are transforming many industries, including the education segment.


The impact of Edtechs
In two books on transformations that affect education - "Disrupting Class," coauthored with Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson, which had a revised and expanded edition released in the United States in October 2016, and The Innovative University in co-authored with Henry Eyring of 2011 - Christensen looks at the future of the universities we know.

The conclusion: online education, which has been most recently propagated by Edtechs, will become a more economical and efficient way for students to be educated. According to him, the business models of traditional institutions will either die out or have to be redesigned to make way for hybrid or 100% digital models.

Closures and Mergers
Christensen is not alone in his analysis. The US Department of Education and Moody's Investors Service project that in the coming years, closing rates for small colleges and universities will triple and mergers will double.

There is, however, one aspect, according to Christensen, that online education can not replace. In his most recent research on the subject, he found that most alumni who made generous donations to their schools did so because a teacher.

This teacher, according to the former donor students heard by Christensen, had a high impact on the training of their students, either because they were inspirers or excellent tutors.