Why Arizona State University Should Win The Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to 111 individuals and 30 organizations since its inception. Among the 30 organizations, no university has ever won. It’s time that changes. Few institutions across the globe have had a larger, more lasting impact on human development and human flourishing than institutions of higher education. And among the thousands of universities globally, none have become a more shining example than Arizona State University.

For the past two decades, ASU has measured itself “not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed.” This driving mission of access and scale combined with quality has catapulted it to a position as the world’s most exemplar university. Behind President Michael Crow’s leadership, ASU has created a culture of innovation that is unprecedented in higher education history. U.S. News & World Report has named it the #1 Most Innovative University for 9 consecutive years.

Since Crow’s arrival, the student census has more than tripled from roughly 40,000 to 150,000. This includes a 5-fold increase in international students – now nearly 18,000 total – making ASU the #1 U.S. public university on this count. Not only are students increasingly flocking to ASU, but so are other universities. Each year, hundreds of delegates from universities travel to ASU to benchmark their various programs and models. The visits and visitors are so many that the university had to create a dedicated office to support them.

ASU was the first comprehensive public university to pioneer and scale online education. It began by making the critical decision to use the same faculty from their on-campus programs to teach their online programs – providing them with training, tools and support staff. Today, ASU enrolls more than 65,000 online students.

ASU has also become a global R&D lab of sorts for improving the efficacy and scale of education. One example is their investment in AI-enabled software tools designed to improve the pass rates for introductory math courses in engineering. Dramatic improvements in the pass rates of these introductory math courses (typically referred to as “weed out” courses because of how many students typically fail them) are driving rapid growth in engineering degree conferrals. ASU’s engineering school is now the largest in the U.S. and has grown 10-fold in the past twenty years.

Another R&D example at ASU includes their launch of an experimental virtual reality lab – in partnership with Dreamscape Immersive – to improve the efficacy of their introductory biology courses. Buoyed by strong efficacy showing the program boosted the percent of students getting an ‘A’ in the course by 1.7x and eliminated gaps in performance for traditionally underrepresented students, the virtual reality experience has now been scaled to more than 20,000 students in the past two years and now is expanding to more subjects.

With the launch of ASU Digital Prep and Study Hall, ASU is now educating tens of thousands of K-12 students and helping prepare hundreds of thousands more for college. These moves are fundamentally reimagining the role of ‘university’ in K12 education. Through its efforts with Cintana Education, ASU is helping power nearly two dozen universities around the world by providing them with curriculum, tools and best practices to grow and improve quality.

Over the past decade, there has been a growing movement among employers offering “education benefits” to their employees in the form of funding college degrees. The catalyst of this movement was ASU’s partnership with Starbucks which was announced in 2014. Since then, more than 10,000 Starbucks employees have earned their college degree from ASU and more than 23,000 are currently pursuing one.

ASU has made access (not exclusivity) the new definition of “elite” in higher education. It has pioneered online education, university-employer partnerships for education benefits, K12 and college readiness outreach programs, education R&D at scale – and has created a culture of innovation inside an industry known more for its lack of change. It has become a beacon of economic mobility for hundreds of thousands of students across the globe and a model for thousands of other universities – ultimately impacting millions of students. Nobel Prize worthy, for sure.