The president of IIT discusses the future of technology education

To find out how, Perkins&Will urban design principal Gautam Sundaram sat down with Echambadi to discuss the educational innovations he’s overseen, what he thinks of partnerships with private industry, the importance of place in today’s hybrid world, and more. The following conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.

Raj Echambadi: I earned my undergraduate engineering degree in India and came to the U.S. to get a PhD in business administration. I was later hired as a tenure-track professor at the University of Illinois and my academic research was, essentially, about disruptive innovation in business. I was explaining how businesses strategically exploit markets and explore future markets. In fact, my co-authors and I were the first to demonstrate that businesses’ R&D departments often create knowledge that they don’t capitalize on, which can actually hurt those enterprises. Think of how Kodak invented the first digital camera, but didn’t want digital technology to degrade its film sales. Or how Blockbuster was so firmly committed to physical video rental stores, even after Netflix started delivering DVDs by mail and going digital.

So I was doing this work in strategic management and in 2014, we had a major turning point at the University of Illinois. Our MBA rankings declined, and I was tasked with leading a team to create a new type of MBA. I decided to focus on online learning, because I was tuned into the parallels between our program and the businesses I had studied. I realized it was important for higher educational institutions to manage their physical and digital offerings together.

There were 180 online MBA programs in the country at the time, and I knew we had to do something different. So we invented a program called iMBA. It was the first program built for scale. It was the first program that was unbundled. People had multiple on-ramps and off-ramps. It’s now considered to be one of the most disruptive educational innovations of the last decade, and we launched it.

It’s still the largest online MBA program in the United States, awarding about 10% of all degrees in the nation. The program’s success opened up academic possibilities for me; I went to Northeastern where I was the dean of the business school for four years before I came here.

RE: To me there are three immutable truths about higher education. Number one, higher education worldwide is the biggest opportunity engine for a population. I’m very proud to now be a part of Illinois Tech, an institution which is number one in Illinois in terms of moving people up and #1 in Illinois for ROI according to payscale. So the opportunity engine is absolutely self-evident, which is why I’m very proud to be a part of higher education.

The second thing is that we need to broaden education. There’s a lot of room to grow. Of the 255 million people in the U.S. who are 18 years or over, 165 million don’t have a four-year degree. That’s huge. And that number is even higher, of course, when you consider the entire world. We need to start thinking about using technology to unleash people’s potential and enhance the GDP.

And finally, education must be combined with the relevance of the real world. Rigor plus relevance is what matters in terms of creating impactful citizens. This is personal for me. Higher education enabled the social and economic mobility for my own family, so I’m deeply appreciative of what higher education has provided for me, and hopefully I can share the same benefits of higher education that I had to large swaths of the human population around the world.

RE: It all comes back to the whole opportunity engine. Illinois Tech, as an institution, has been focused on economic opportunity and educating students from all walks of life for about 135 years. And I think a lot of my personal commitment to that mission is informed by my own background. I’m where I am today because education was accessible and affordable.

You can’t be an opportunity engine if you don’t make education affordable and accessible. Today we are proud to say that close to 50% of our students are either first generation and/or Pell Grant recipients. Bloomberg Philanthropies called us a high-flying institution last year, basically because not only do we provide access, but our success rate is roughly 90% employment or additional study six months after graduation. That connection of access and success is key.

We were founded in 1890 on a noble vision to educate students from all walks of life, and our initial fundraising effort was fulfilled by a million-dollar donation by Philip Danforth. In my second year here, we launched a billion-dollar campaign and we are about halfway through achieving that goal. Bringing private philanthropy alongside our organization to make education affordable is going to be critical.

RE: Yes! A lot of times, for example, fewer than a quarter of Chicago Public Schools students have the prerequisites for many of our programs because of lack of math and science in their curriculum.

So we launched a program last year called Runway 606 where we work with public schools to ensure that students can, over a six-year period—their junior year and senior year in high school and four years in college—get not only a bachelor’s but also a master’s degree. We are starting programs to enhance accessibility for students so they can actually get technology jobs. So the point that you are making that higher education must be affordable and accessible is absolutely the central credo of how we operate and at a larger level, why we exist.

RE: Absolutely. In fact, about three years ago we pivoted to a new identity called Elevate, as in “elevate your future.” And that’s exactly what it is: It elevates people by providing access to a rigorous and relevant education. What does that mean? Elevate mandates experiential learning, so students’ education and employment is seamlessly connected.

I am unapologetic in my view that employment is a critical, successful outcome of technology education. After I spoke at an event, one of my fellow presidents said to me, “You realize education is not just for employment, right? It is for enlightenment.”

And I thought, “For a lot of us, enlightenment comes after employment.” As university administrators and leaders, we need to understand that students and their families are paying inordinately high amounts of money, making real sacrifices to come here. It is our job to bring that relevance.

This is not to say there is no critical thinking in the curriculum. Of course, we need to have critical thinking and entrepreneurialism and innovation and ethics and so on. But we must show students the relevance so they build the right kind of skills and capabilities to be impactful, so they can provide for their families and enjoy economic and social mobility. When you align rigor and relevance, people will find meaningful jobs, and they view education as an investment.

RE: I think we need to solve three problems: How do we integrate noncredit and credit? How do we integrate industry credentials and academic content? And, last but not least, how do we incorporate prior learning?

For far too long in academia we have claimed to know all the answers, but the old four-year degree model is gone. Completion rates will decline unless we build systems with stickability and flexibility, because people’s lives and circumstances get in the way of a rigid, traditional path.

So we’re convening an ecosystem that brings different partners together to create a holistic product that benefits our students. We mandate experiential learning, and the student decides what experiential learning they take in a particular year. It could be an internship. It could be a project with a partner. It could be study abroad or study away. It could be participation in a research project with a professor who is collaborating with a partner, or it could be participation in student government. A student can do a variety of things in order to get experiential learning, but having a portfolio of these experiences over several years is what matters.

As an educational institution, we are focused on long-term skills like critical thinking, entrepreneurialism, and moral thinking. And we need partners who can help us manage the pace that the industry needs, and that is why we were, I think, one of the first universities in the country to validate and accept industry credentials. So somebody who’s doing a master’s in computer science can do a cloud computing certification from Amazon Web Services and it will count toward their academic degree.

We’re also interested in building multiple on ramps and off ramps. You can come in anytime, can go out anytime if you get admitted this year. We have stacked the credentials so people could do industry credentials from anywhere. Maybe you don’t commit to a full degree, you’re coming for a non-credit course and then you move it to credit.

Ultimately universities exist to give people the chance at meaningful lives, and for most of them that probably means going out and getting a job. So it behooves us to understand and integrate employer needs.

RE: Place is always going to be important, and learning has to evolve to operate in multiple modalities. So how do you infuse those modalities into a place to be accessible, to be affordable, to make learning as widespread as possible? For somebody who lives in rural Idaho, online may be the only way to do it, but somebody who can access a physical campus will probably want to. And sometimes it’s a hybrid of both. But we’re always thinking about incorporating technologies to make education accessible. If it’s completely about place, then you significantly limit people who don’t have access to that place.

It’s a complex issue because a physical location enables you to have roots. We are proud of the fact that we are in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. We are deeply tied to the history of the community. We are connected, and we have win-win relationships, and to me, therefore, that notion of place will always be important. And we just launched a research campus in the Fulton Market District, right above the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Biohub Chicago. We’re also starting a new graduate innovation campus in Wheaton, Illinois. We have our law school and the Business School in West Adams. We are also potentially looking at a physical campus in Asia over the next year.

I think of our locations as a network of nodes. We want to be a global opportunity that educates students from diverse backgrounds so they can become impactful citizens of the world. We exist to make the lives of students better. We do research so that we are at the cutting-edge and we transfer that research to our students. We teach our students. We exist in a community. We provide opportunities for our students to interact with the community so that they can contextualize their learning.