You may have heard once or twice about Arizona State University and how innovative it is. You probably don’t know the half of it. Today I am going to rectify that because it may be the institution from which Canadian universities need to learn the most over the next few years.

A lot of the initial attention to what ASU was doing differently focused on the way that faculties got rearranged in the early 2000s. The university still runs traditional faculties in areas like Business, Law, Education, and Journalism. But it also has some very strange mixes: a College of Global Futures which offers bachelor’s degrees in “Sustainability” and “Innovation in Society” (in both a BSc and a BA); a College of Public Service and Community Solutions, which binds together schools of Criminology, Public Affairs, Communication, and Leisure Studies; a College of Health Solutions (mainly allied health disciplines); and also a College of Nursing and Health Innovation (mainly about health systems). Similarly, it has two colleges of Arts and Sciences: one “interdisciplinary” and the other “integrative” (which, approximately, is a synonym for “applied”). These kinds of boundary-straddling faculties are not unknown elsewhere (Carleton’s Faculty of Public Affairs comes to mind), but it is suggestive of a mindset which is not constricted by traditional disciplinary groupings.

But that’s really just the superficial stuff. More important is the way that Arizona State thinks of itself less as a university than an “enterprise”—or rather, a series of enterprises. On the research side, it thinks of itself less simply as a recipient of federal research funds (though it does pretty well at that—research income is up about sixfold in the past twenty years) than as of a knowledge/wealth creator. Go look at its Knowledge Enterprise Branch. Look at how it has almost doubled their research expenditures in a decade (something no Canadian institution has come close to achieving). Look at how Skysong Innovations, ASU’s IP management company, has worked to develop partnerships with major industrial partners and attracted over $1 billion in investments to ASU and its spinoff companies. This is an institution which has a very serious commitment to ensuring research impact.

But Arizona State isn’t just entrepreneurial with respect to its research enterprise. It’s also with respect to its learning enterprise. This piece is key: ASU does not see itself as being a purveyor of degrees but rather as a provider of learning. Sure, it does the basics of a state university and does them exceptionally well: its enrolment has more than doubled in the last fifteen years, mainly but not exclusively through the expansion of online offerings. Enrolment now sits at around 170,000 in total, all while increasing retention and completion rates, especially for black and Hispanic students. But ASU doesn’t just do traditional education—it runs bootcamps, educational partnerships with secondary schools and major corporations (its deal with Starbucks to provide online education for all of its American employees was one of the most interesting corporate tie-ups of the last decade). It is simply not confined by tradition when it comes to instructional forms.

So those are the three obvious ways in which ASU differs from most universities: interdisciplinarity, research impact, and an expansive definition of learning. But we still haven’t yet got to the piece that really differentiates it from other institutions. Yes, ASU is innovative in program delivery and research practices. But there’s another piece here: it is also relentlessly focused on driving down costs.

Arizona’s government has not, until quite recently, been any great shakes in terms of funding higher education. More often than not, higher education is the first thing to get cut in an emergency and while the state increased funding by a whopping 50% over the past five years, that still doesn’t quite bring levels up to where they were in real terms in 2008. Arizona State has been systemically starved of funds.

And yet, it persisted. Part of what happened was a hunt for a more diversified set of revenue sources. More money always helps. But also, the institution used technology and scale to hammer down per-student expenses by almost 30% over two decades. That’s operational excellence. And it is this more than anything else that provided the institution with the margin it needed to excel.

At a certain level, it is difficult to imagine any university imitating ASU. It’s easy enough to recite its accomplishments (more interdisciplinarity! more research! lean management!) but it’s hard to actually work out what steps ASU took to achieve this status. And I’ve tried! The President, Michael Crow, has written two books with university historian William Dabars (Designing the New American University and The Fifth Wave: The Evolution of American Higher Education) which purport to tell ASU’s story but which in fact are almost entirely mum on the question of how exactly the university’s transformation actually occurred. The best explanation I’ve heard is that Crow deliberately hires underdogs—people with a chip on their shoulder, people who feel they have something to prove—and lets them loose. I don’t know if this is true or not, but it’s probably not a bad HR policy if so. (That said, my understanding is that the culture change involved in getting a university to move this far this fast also involved a lot of people leaving the organization as well.)

In any event, if you want all the big picture details on what ASU has been able to accomplish, do take a look at this slide deck which recounts all the data on access, teaching, research and engagement thematically. It’s all impressive, but maybe no bit more so than the ability to remain lean and drive down per-student costs (or, more accurately, keeping their costs relatively stable while massively increasing enrolment). In the new era of post-secondary funding, few institutional attributes will be more vital.