Tuesday, January 12, 2010

What Will the New Decade Mean for Higher Education?

As the clock struck midnight and the ball dropped in Times Square, I realized that we had passed an important decade and were entering an even more important one. The ten years from 2000-2009 brought immense change to the world: the 9/11 attack on the world trade center, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the global meltdown, and an era of massive borrowing and foreclosures.

Bush gave way to Obama. China and India rose as major players on the world scene. The household phone gave way to cellular. In technology, we had social networks bloom with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and many more. The iPhone, Google Maps, MP3 players, the Wii player, Bluetooth, BlueRay, GPS units on phones and in cars, the Kindle, and eBooks. And, of course, we had Avatar demonstrating the 3-D and simulation technology that will be commonplace in future films.

But how has education changed in the past decade? For the most part, very little. Most teaching still takes place in a classroom with a chalkboard or whiteboard. Teachers and faculty augment lectures with multimedia in their classroom, with PowerPoint presentations and some video. Software for instruction and labs has grown in many fields. Increasingly, faculty are using hybrid and online formats as a regular part of teaching. Expect this to grow even more in the coming decade.

In the next decade, more books (including textbooks) will be read online than on your lap. HD televisions will give way to 3-D TVs. Holographic displays will be used in science and simulation. Most cell phones will have HD projectors and two-way video conferencing. Cars and phones will read your email to you. And, by 2020, new developments in technology, expansion of high speed networks, and dropping prices will make video conferencing available in most K-12 and higher education classrooms.

What will be the Major Trends by 2020 in Higher Education:

1. A Massive Growth in Online Education: The Sloan Foundation projects that online learning will pass face-to-face classroom instruction by 2015. The Chronicle for Higher Education projects that by 2020 as much as 60% of all college credit hours earned will be online. The learner will be able to pick from a variety of courses online to select the most convenient time or format and as needed.

**By 2015, expect to see most classes and most degrees available 24/7 online to laptops, phones, and TVs.

**Several universities already offer free lectures and conferences online. Expect this to grow, with more people watching and learning.

2. Integration of Life and Learning: Education will take place less and less in the classroom. Businesses will encourage employees to take courses to upgrade skills on an as-needed basis, with many courses being received on-site. Education will become more learner-centered and learner-initiated. Life-long learning will increasingly become a reality. Students will be encouraged to use the tools of the internet, social networking, and new technologies to explore learning and to find new sources of data. But, they will also be encouraged to log-off and get engaged in the communities they live in or to visit other countries.

**Just-in-time learning will become common place with learners seeking out knowledge, courses, certificates, and degrees as needed.

**Expect internships, co-ops, and service learning to grow and increasingly to be required for graduation.

3. Transferability and Transportability: Students and their parents are frustrated that they can't transfer courses from one institution to another. There will be increased pressures from states and the federal government to ensure institutions work together on transfer agreements. Europe has already begun this process in more than a dozen majors. The U.S. has been slow to move on this, but will do so over the next decade.

**Expect accreditation bodies and federal regulators to pressure institutions to accept more transfer credits.

**Expect students to shop online for the most affordable, quality courses and take as many as possible, aggregating their courses until they pick one institution that will accept those credits and help them graduate.

4. Growing Crisis of Affordability: Higher Education is pricing itself out of business. Students and parents are tired of paying outrageous tuition to private universities, where tuition, fees and ancillary costs have already topped $40,000. Scholarships are not keeping up with costs. Many flagship public universities are increasing merit-based scholarships at the expense of needs-based aid.

**Enrollments at community colleges and comprehensive universities will grow as students are unable to afford high-priced tuition and are unwilling to assume huge debt to go to more expensive institutions.

**Expect public and private universities to offer some courses for free, or at highly-discounted prices particularly for teachers and high school students.

**Expect most colleges to "give" each student a laptop when they arrive (the price of which is wrapped in tuition and fees) or at least have laptops for check-out.

**In addition, expect more states to adopt legislation to limit tuition increases by public universities.

5. Stack-able Credits: Several community colleges and continuing education programs have already started this on limited basis, but expect this trend to grow. Instead of a 3 hour (3-unit) course taught over 15 weeks, courses in some fields will be divided into modules of 1 hour (1 unit) each or even less (.5 unit). When all modules are completed the learner earns 3-units credit (usually requiring completion of a project, paper, or final).

**Expect institutions to design stack-able courses, certificates and degrees.

6. Compressed Semesters: Universities already offer courses in compressed mode during summer or winter sessions. These courses are usually taught 3 hours per day for 3 weeks. Sometimes, they are taught two nights a week plus two full weekends.

**As more students work full-time, expect more students to demand and more institutions to offer compressed courses and schedules.

7. More Adjunct Faculty: It is a sad fact that the number of tenure-track positions are disappearing rapidly. Nationally, tenure-track faculty represent less than 50% of all faculty positions. Unfortunately, this will continue, as universities are pressed to serve more students with less public funding.

**But, expect universities to increase benefits and pay for adjuncts and to offer more regular contracts.

8. Compressed Degrees and New Incentives: Europe has already moved to three year bachelors degrees and the U.K. is exploring 2 year degrees. Expect pressure to reduce time to degree completion. In the U.S., a little more than a quarter of students in "four-year" universities graduate in four years and a little more than half graduate in six years.

**Expect states to adopt incentives to fund universities based on the number of degrees awarded rather than simply funding universities based on the student credit hours produced.

**Expect expansion of dual-credit courses with more high school students taking college courses and earning certificates and even associate arts degrees before graduating high school.

9. More American Students Studying Abroad American students learn about other countries in their classrooms. Now, they will talk with students from other countries in the class through video conferencing, social networks and Skype.

**Expect more U.S. students to visit other countries, study there, do research and get involved in service projects.

10. The Continuing Crisis for Funding: While the global economic crisis is slowly ending, the crisis in public funding of higher education will intensify. To continue its economic growth and leadership, America will have to confront funding for public higher education. Failure to find proper funding for the growing higher education needs of its population is not an option, unless Americans accept a decline in this country's prestige, power, economic growth, and standard of living.

**Expect institutions to make major cuts in areas ancillary to their main mission. Some will reduce building expansion, particularly as online enrollments grow, but also as some academic programs are merged or eliminated.

**Universities will likely adjust schedules to make more use of existing space (such as offering more classes at night and on weekends).

**Expect to see some institutions with Division I sports (particularly those which are deeply in the red) to move to Division II. Others will jettison certain high-cost sports, such as football. Also, expect national policy discussions to heat up on the BCS and the sky-rocketing cost of collegiate sports--with likely congressional hearings.

**Expect policy discussions over the next decade on a 21st Century Master Plan for American Higher Education--to keep this country strong, to provide real pathways for life-long learning, to invigorate learning with rapid innovations in technologies and software, and to develop the science, technology, and innovation that is heart of this nation's economic engine.

**Finally, expect America to find ways to make it possible for more students to earn their college degrees at an affordable price. We must work together to find mechanisms to keep higher education accessible and affordable. We can't afford not to!

1 comment:

  1. Hello Bill,

    I saw your update in LinkedIn as we are both Stanford Alums (1980-1985/Education & Neuropsychology/Dr. Karl Pribram’s Lab)

    My thought, yes just one, is that 2010-2020 (perfect vision 20-20) will include a focus on helping students define their natural life and career paths more effectively than ever before.

    It's gonna' be a time of revolutionary Self-evolution.

    For me the millennium brought in the next generation of mind-fullness or the age of the human mind. Even tech itself is mirroring more and more the literal design and functionality of our minds (...and for reasons I spell out in my own blog(s) and elsewhere over the years.)

    (IMHO) This emergent "Age of Mind" will force us to come to know our "True Self" or what I like to call our "YOUnique Self" with greater and greater felt-clarity and action-able coherence.

    This new and fuller Self-Knowing is and will continue to be more and more essential in this new time and will affect all matter of admissions, course/path selection, counseling, social networking, career placement, and individual "self-quantification" measurement and assessment. Yep, believe it or not human "self-quantification" is an emergent field.

    Also, and quite importantly, the process of knowing our individual gifts and dispositions is an interpretive one, not a static testing derivative.

    Finally - and within this tiny digital box I am writing in as an interval of space and thought - teens and students should begin to be able learn to discover the evolving idea and evolving experience of deep personal resonance to their own gifts and dispositions and from this the same as applied to their life-work as a life-path.

    This learning needs to begin before students get to college yet no matter where it begins it should also happen here.

    A student's life-purpose should be founded on their gifts. This is our great awakening I feel - the more conscious and complete alignment of our true and YOUnique Self with our gift-driven nature and our unique purpose. This should be our gift to our children and our students.

    How many graduates chose their areas of concentration and therein their career start-points based on a conscious awareness of their personal and unique and natural gifts and innately disposed and unique Self?

    Less than 10%? Less than 5%?

    How many should have begun such a journey with this knowledge?

    100%.

    How many will in the next 10 years?

    Good question.

    Cheers Bill and best of luck in your new and very exciting position there at University of Houston-Downtown

    Brian
    J. Brian Hennessy

    Some of my digital voice can come to be known here:
    http://imonad.wordpress.com - The Ecology-of-Mind
    http://letoonz.wordpress.com - An evolutionary-ontology characterized in cartoon form

    ReplyDelete