Many observers suggest that the pandemic will accelerate the pace of change and innovation in higher education. But how much innovation has actually occurred? In this article, Richard Garrett takes a look at three areas that offered the prospect of “system-level innovation”: for-profit education, different kinds of credentials, and online education. Presenting data from 2000–2020, he shows that these have failed to take hold in a systemic way. There are “pockets of innovation” in higher education, but “innovative rhetoric … has not been matched by system-level impact.” However, he also notes that the pandemic has given online education, the relatively most successful of the three, “an opportunity like no other.” A number of the other articles in this issue explore this last idea.
