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Change: How to Make Big Things Happen by Damon Centola
Published in January of 2021.
Yesterday, I wrote about graduate student debt and the idea that low-cost master's programs might be a possible solution.
In that piece, I posed three questions:
- What would it take for a new cost norm for master's programs to take hold?
- What proportion of all master's programs would need to be affordable (say half the cost of traditional residential master's programs) to bend the graduate program cost curve?
- What are the enablers and the inhibitors for schools developing and launching their own low-cost online master's programs?
In this piece, I'd like to propose that we adopt Damon Centola's complex contagion framework to help us get at some of the answers to the questions above.
In Change: How to Make Big Things Happen, Centola (a sociologist at Penn) synthesizes the research (much of it his own) on the relationship between networks and innovation. Centola's analysis begins with a curiosity of how individuals (and then groups) move past an existing status quo when making a change involves non-trivial risks and potentially high switching costs.
Change can take the form of social innovations, such as the traction that the Black Lives Matter movement gained as an organizing principle to address issues of systemic and structural racism.
Change can also take the form of technological or product innovations. In the book, Centola unpacks the underlying reasons why platforms like Twitter could grow successfully, while Google Plus (remember that?) failed so miserably.
The framework that Centola introduces in Change is to understand innovation through the lens of networks.
Centola starts with the observation that most of us have been taught to think about how change happens is mostly wrong.
We know it is not the case that people make decisions by carefully sifting through the available evidence and then aligning their actions to the data. It is no surprise that we all engage in motivated reasoning and that we will choose to accept or reject facts based on our prior beliefs.
What we may not know is that conventional wisdom about change is also wrong. There is this idea that if only enough influencers can be found, then everyone else can be influenced. That thought leaders are effective in leading thought, and that ideas spread by the example of exemplars.
Centering the conversation back to low-cost online programs (something Centola does not discuss), the challenge we face is changing people's minds about what a "normal" master's program is. By "people," I mean (or think I mean) whoever those humans are at colleges and universities that decide on the design, delivery, content, and pricing of master's programs.
The idea is to view a low-cost online master's program as a social innovation. The status quo is high-priced master's programs (lots of student debt), and the innovation is a low-cost master's program (little student debt).
Are you with me?
For Centola, the challenge of changing people's minds away from the status quo of a high-priced graduate program to a low-priced one requires that we think in terms of a complex contagion. A simple contagion is when the change we are looking for is relatively cost-free. In a simple contagion, the stakes are low.
Where simple ideas can spread like a virus, the process of changing existing norms is more complex. A complex change like moving from high-cost to low-cost graduate degree programs will not spread like a virus. Instead, a more complex - and network-mediated - process would govern this transformation.
Thought leaders and influencers can be effective in driving simple changes. They don't work so well if the stakes are high and the change is complex.
For a complex contagion to take hold, the connections between the people in the network who will drive change need to be wide, durable, and redundant.
For colleges and universities, the decision to create low-cost online graduate programs will only occur if the networks that decision-makers are embedded in become supportive of this innovation. A broad consensus must form within the network that low-cost online graduate programs make sense for both schools and students.
What will not work is to assume that if only "the leading schools" created low-cost online degree programs, everyone else will follow. The more likely result is that other institutions will perceive that sort of innovation as exceptional and unrealistic. It works for them because they are special, but it will not work for us.
I found reading Change: How to Make Big Things Happen to be extraordinarily helpful in thinking about how we might grow the number of low-cost graduate degree programs across the postsecondary ecosystem. That is a big change I want to see happen, and I've been wondering how to get from here to there.
I learned from the book that the appropriate focus should be on nurturing the network connections between schools. That deans, provosts, directors, faculty, and other campus decision-makers need to participate in conversations and information exchange across their networks if the norms around graduate programs are to change.
Put another way, the road to a new norm of low-cost graduate programs may not run through technological or pedagogical advances. This is not a matter of coming up with more persuasive arguments or of convincing a few early adopters to adopt.
Instead, the path to low-cost degrees will be built by widening the connecting bridges in the network of college and university decision-makers who ultimately determine if their schools will pursue this educational innovation.
More effort needs to be made to understand how existing higher education networks form and operate. New networks around low-cost online degree programs need to be built and nurtured.
Changing norms is difficult under any circumstance. Changing the norm of what schools and students think about when they think of master's programs is a wicked problem. Numerous constituencies benefit from the current system.
The only way to move off the existing master's program status quo - one of high-priced programs that result in massive levels of student debt- might just be by spreading the complex contagion of low-cost degrees.
What are you reading?
