Invent Ed: How an American Tradition of Innovation Can Transform College Today

An essential guidebook on innovation in higher education—and how we can ensure student success in college by looking to the history of American invention.

Invent Ed is a much-needed contribution to the broad ecosystem of innovation, creativity, and higher education in America. Our country’s many generations of inventors, from Benjamin Franklin to modern visionaries like Steve Jobs, have made important new discoveries by putting existing knowledge into unexpected new combinations. This inventive method has led to the discoveries that have made the nation a global power.

Influential educational leader Caroline Levander provides examples of how to integrate this creative method into the student experience. She offers industry leaders, regulators, and parents valuable insight into how to make the American college experience all that it should be. After tracing the riveting and forgotten history of invention in America, Invent Ed provides a succinct and useful account of how American colleges rose to global prominence and how they operate today. It then offers guidance on how to renew US higher education and thereby ensure the nation’s ongoing vitality.

Caroline Field Levander is Vice President and Carlson Chair in the Humanities at Rice University. She is the author of numerous books on American culture, has held leadership positions on Coursera, 2U/EdX, the Fulbright Association among others, and has led strategic growth and innovation across the industry.