Natural Capitalism and Higher Education?

My introductory MBA course is focusing on the "value chain," and since the UofA and Wal-Mart are big into sustainability right now, there's lots of related talk about "natural capitalism" and how to rethink our various structures.

One of the basic points is that we currently think in terms of production (make something, use something, and then throw it away) instead of solutions to meeting needs. A company like Carrier, for example, is starting to lease "comfort levels" for a building instead of just building the air-conditioning systems. If Carrier can then find ways to provide the same comfort levels for lower long term cost, then they make more money, even if that means that they're producing fewer air conditioners.

Neat idea, but it hasn't quite caught on yet. We still prefer "owning" our stuff, such as buying music and books that we could get via a music service or check out from the library for less money and with less "waste."

But this has got me thinking about what might be the implications for higher education. Right now, we're often in the business of selling courses and seat time. You "buy" the course, you "use" the course, and then you throw away the books and the notes afterwards. That's the old production model.

Now let's think about this in terms of natural capitalism's service approach. What if (and there are lots of "ifs" here) you made a series of promises about attaining a certain level of content knowledge, demonstrating certain skills, getting placed into graduate school or a job, developing certain critical thinking abilities, etc. and then were told that you'll pay a package rate to get to these marks, however long it takes. You could incentivize both sides to try to accomplish these goals quicker, but the point is that you're putting a price on the outcome (such as Carrier's leasing of "comfort") instead of on the consumption activity.

Of course, this assumes all sorts of things like being able to define and test for those outcomes with enough accuracy that you could sell your product and be able to verify its effectiveness, but it would move us toward this "natural capitalism" approach. Not sure I'd want to attend this type of university, but with many of our JBU students already getting about a quarter of their credits via AP and CLEP tests, we're part of the way there already.