Students pass in front of Harvard's Widener Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Here is an excerpt from a special article co-authored by Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring featured by CNN online. To read the complete article and check out a wealth of other resources, please click here.

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• CNN.com’s op-eds on college ranged from calling it a waste of time to high praise
• Writers believe colleges are invaluable, but they need to change to remain releva
• In imitating Harvard, they become costly ivory towers that are too exclusive, they sa
• They say: End summer break, develop online coursework, focus on undergrads

Editor’s note: Clayton Christensen, Robert and Jane Cizik professor of business administration, Harvard Business School, and Henry Eyring, advancement vice president, BYU-Idaho, are co-authors of The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out (Jossey-Bass, August 2011).

(CNN) — Is college an invaluable waste of time? You bet. But it’s about to get even more valuable.

It’s great to see capable people debating the value of higher education. Earlier this month, Dale Stephens, a 19-year-old entrepreneur who has won a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship, wrote that “College is a waste of time.” One can argue that Dale is too young — and too extraordinarily intelligent — to be a good judge of the value of college to the average person. But if students like Dale, the kind that the best schools want to attract, are dissatisfied, that can’t be good. Anyhow, Dale’s description of college as a place of conformity, competition and regurgitation strikes an uneasy chord with some of us older, more-ordinary folk.

Two more smart people responded to Dale’s argument. One of them, Brian Forde, is a successful entrepreneur who went back to school for an MBA degree because he found gaps in the knowledge he needed to lead his company. Brian described his higher education as “invaluable.”

Joseph Aoun, whose Northeastern University runs one of the best cooperative education programs anywhere, argued that “College is your best bet.”

He shared sobering data on the price of not having a college degree in difficult economic times such as these.

It’s important to be debating these things, because Dale, Brian, and Joseph are all correct. Going to college today is more important than ever. In this world of unprecedented change, now isn’t the time to be staying away from the institutions whose primary mission is to discover and share knowledge. But these institutions have put themselves at risk by allowing the education they offer to become expensive, hard to access and unengaging relative to what is possible.

They didn’t mean to do this. In fact, our colleges and universities are all about getting bigger and better, and their success has made us much better off. The problem is that too many of them, including former community colleges and technical institutes, now act more like Harvard, the world’s most widely admired university.

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To read the complete article and check out a wealth of other resources, please click here.