Acknowledgments
The book you are about to read owes a great deal to many people.
To begin with, I want to thank the thousands of people who participate in the Future of Education Observatory (FOE). Future Trends in Technology and Education readers and contributors have shared many stories over the past decade and have patiently responded to my writing. Among them I count George Station, who has been a generous and provocative friend in conversations across a variety of venues. Todd Bryant, Linda Burns, Matthew Henry, and Shel Sax have thoughtfully shared many articles. Jeff Benton has helped me with business and economics. The chapters of this book are smarter and more knowledgeable as a result.
Future Trends Forum guests and participants have informed, challenged, and enlightened us all through open and brave conversations. I am grateful to members of that community for their contributions: Maria Anderson, Michael Berman, Fred Beshears, Roxann Riskin, Vanessa Vaile, and Michael Corbett Wilson, among many more. I also thank the fine Shindig crew that powered the forum: Christopher Downs, Steve Gottleib, and Tara Peitzer.
The FOEcast team has sought to boldly reimagine a twenty-firstcentury futuring organization, and I have learned a great deal by working with them: Maya Georgieva, Tom Haymes, Keesa Johnson, Tyler Kendal, Phil Long, and Jonathan Nalder.
Many other friends and collaborators have contributed to the making of this book, and so I must thank Linda Burns, the late Peter
Feltham, Joshua Kim, George Lorenzo, Joe Murphy, Howard Rheingold, Mike Roy, Mike Sellers, and Ed Webb for sending me stories, for checking my wild reactions, and for letting me bounce ideas off of them. Steven Greenlaw kindly helped me study macroeconomics.
My old friends Steven Kaye and Jesse Walker have been by my virtual side throughout the composition of this book, and I owe them immensely for their fine sharing of resources and thoughts. They have been outrageously generous with their time, criticism, and support.
EDUCAUSE Review published articles and columns of mine, giving me a chance to try out early versions of some futures ideas. I’m grateful to editor Teddy Diggs for her support.
For years, Ilsley Public Library hosted my research. Their interlibrary loan service was helpful, as was their media lab. My thanks to their thoughtful directors and kind support staff.
In 2018, Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship program made me a senior scholar and let me teach a class on education’s futures. Somehow this experience convinced them to send more students my way in 2019. I am thankful to CNDLS leader Eddie Maloney for these opportunities and conversations. I thank my students for letting me try out ideas and pedagogies— they are paladins of higher education’s future.
My editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, Greg Britton, has been enormously supportive from start to finish. I have benefited from his keen editorial eye, thoughtful ideas, and consideration, and I appreciate that he allowed me to barrage him with far too many schemes. He connected me with a burgeoning stable of writers exploring higher education’s fate with critical eyes and excellent writing. Greg, too, is a paladin of academia’s future.
My family played a key role in this book’s creation. During the course of it my children Gwynneth and Owain proceeded with their own university careers, and kindly put up with my odd questions and advice. My wife, Ceredwyn, has been the greatest, most steadfast ally since the project began. She has put up with my writing frenzies, the
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sudden brainstorms, the halting and manic drafts, and the book’s many, many long hours. She is a fine writer, an extraordinary colleague, and the love of my life.
These and others are the source of this book’s intelligence and reflection. All errors and lapses are solely my own.
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Introduction
The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests. It’s the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.
Clay Shirky
What is happening to American higher education? How will it change in the years to come?
The future of higher education is a popular topic in news media, prompting headlines and reports pitched to various degrees of concern. We frequently read, watch, or listen to stories of skyrocketing tuition, epochal levels of debt, and doomed or culturally destructive students. Grim stories of layoffs and campus closures cross nearly all forms of news media, from print newspapers to podcasts.
Naturally, the topic is one that many of us involved in higher education passionately pursue. Would-be college students wonder about debt and careers, as do their families. Professors ponder the fate of their campuses and their own positions. Staff and administrators strategize in a time of increasing anxiety and doubt.
For years, educators, analysts, policymakers, business leaders, and other interested people have publicly proclaimed or investigated the future of colleges and universities. They have imagined new forms of learning and called for innovative programs, centers, and campuses. Some have wielded government power to reshape academia, while
others have reformed institutions directly or booted up new enterprises from scratch.
At times the future of colleges and universities seems to be in doubt. Over the past decade student loan debt has ballooned beyond $1 trillion while tuitions have soared. Campuses have closed departments, reduced faculty, merged, or even shut down. Technological innovations offer new opportunities for learning while threatening the business models of established campuses. Total undergraduate enrollments have dropped for nearly a decade. Anxieties abound about campus politics and the value of degrees.
And yet American universities remain sought after and respected worldwide. Students travel to these campuses from all continents except Antarctica, and we send researchers and students there anyway. In a sense higher education is one of America’s most brilliant and rewarding exports. Faculty members continue to publish discoveries that expand human knowledge and enrich lives. College sports remain crucial cultural touchstones and, occasionally, profitable businesses. More Americans than ever before have had at least some postsecondary education, while the national consensus is that even more people should attend college.
We seem, in short, to be entering an uncertain and chaotic period for colleges and universities. Possibilities of excellence and extinction stand in conflict. Faculty, staff, and students develop some of the same technologies that return to challenge the survival of academia as we know it. Stories of abuse, corruption, inequality, and violence appear in the news alongside accounts of personal growth, social benefit, intellectual exploration, and human possibility. As of this writing, there is no consensus as to where American higher education is headed.
The desire to guide education’s next decades has grown in recent years. The future has also become darker and more urgent, especially after the 2008 financial disaster. That economic spasm sent many more people into colleges and universities to improve their chances of getting scarce jobs, while gutting endowments and stressing cam-
pus finances to their limits. Escalating debt drew more scrutiny as family budgets tightened, even while interest rates plummeted.
The recovery that followed was halting and uneven, and it is still not complete in 2019. In the meantime student debt has soared and enrollments decreased. More attention—but not nearly enough—has been paid to the fact that most professors are part-timers, hired and fired at will and far too often working in poverty. Meanwhile, many Republicans and even a majority of Democrats think higher education is heading down the wrong path. The national mood for education reform has persisted, even across states and political parties.1
This past decade has also seen the continued development and expansion of the digital revolution. In one way, we may be living in the greatest time in human history for learners, but it has been a challenging time for academic institutions. Thanks to the creation and sharing of digital content through the Internet, would-be learners have access to more materials and experts than ever before. Encyclopedia entries, videos, audio lectures, personal blogs written by experts, courses, textbooks, games, galleries, and entire libraries await the inquiring mind. Yet this educational bonanza has not translated into vibrancy for postsecondary institutions. Instead we speak of higher education as being in crisis, under threat, or a bubble about to burst. Meanwhile, we are also increasingly concerned about Silicon Valley’s many misdeeds, from privacy violations to cynical business models, endless data breaches, and collateral damage affecting numerous industries and perhaps even democracy itself.
This book examines the future of American higher education in the age of information plentitude and sustainability stress. It offers forecasts for how these vital institutions are changing over the next generation. The basis for this work lies in the present, as I examine the real world of colleges and universities and the contexts that shape them for clues as to the emerging future. I identify drivers of change, based on objective evidence, and then proceed to informed speculation about what trends those colleges and universities will craft later in the twenty-first century.
Strong and radical challenges lie ahead for colleges and universities. We will likely see more campuses shrink, merge, or close. Higher education’s reputation could continue to decline. Many institutions will choose to reinvent themselves, a process fraught with stresses, human suffering, and failure. Demographics and economics appear poised to drive massive changes to campuses known for their steadfast identities. Multiple political pressures can whipsaw administrators, faculty, and students. Rapid scientific and technological innovation threatens to reboot nearly every aspect of college life, while driving deeper changes through human civilization itself.
It is only by taking these trends seriously that colleges and universities can improve their chances of survival. Institutional flourishing now requires a future-oriented mind-set. We need the practice and imagination that strategic foresight provides, along with a willingness to thoughtfully experiment, in order to shoot the rapids that loom before us. Otherwise American higher education confronts chronically crisis-oriented budgeting, shrinkage, decline, cuts to operations and staff, program reductions, and merged or closed institutions.
To seriously explore the future of American higher education, it is vital to consider the sector in its entirety. This may seem self-evident, especially to an outside observer, but such examination is actually rarely done, despite—or because of—the sheer size of the sector. There are roughly 4,300 colleges and universities in the United States (or closer to 6,500, depending on whether one counts certain for-profit institutions, and how many survive at a given time).2 Many discussions of academia focus on one sector within the whole, or even on a small group of campuses. Such work is useful on its own terms but can easily miss the bigger picture. A casual glance at books and articles published about higher education over the past twenty years reveals various claims about all colleges and universities, but many of them speak solely from the perspective of several research universities or a handful of liberal arts campuses. Community colleges, which educate more people than any other segment of higher education, are
rarely mentioned, especially in discussions of sky-high tuition, free speech on campus, or lavish residence halls. For-profit education, which boomed in the 1990s and 2000s, is even harder to find represented. Geographically, northeastern campuses often receive the lion’s share of attention, even as the traditional-age population there declines and despite the rich, nationwide panoply of higher learning. Historically black colleges and universities are almost invisible. This book considers the full range of postsecondary education. It is an approach partially based on the unusual trajectory of my career. A three-time graduate from a major public research university (Michigan), I taught at a small liberal art campus (Centenary College of Louisiana) and went on to teach at a private Jesuit research university (Georgetown). In between the last two positions I worked for a nonprofit (National Institute of Technology in Liberal Education) that connected hundreds of small colleges across the country, many considered liberal arts institutions. Some are religious schools, other secular; some focus on teaching while others zero in on research, and still others combine the two. Some are local in their recruiting and outreach focus, while others are regional, national, or international in scope. Starting around 2010, I began working as well with community colleges, for-profits, state universities, state systems, and military universities. Several of these exist completely online, while others actively resist the digital world, and many occupy a position in between. I have also worked with academia-focused think tanks, professional organizations, government agencies, and businesses, not to mention public libraries and library associations. Many of these entities exist in the United States, while some are in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and Latin America. At every step of the way I have talked with people occupying all positions in these organizations: presidents, trustees, librarians, students, grants officers, security guards, state legislators, lawyers, chief financial officers, and more. All of these encounters have given me an unusual perspective on American higher education, and I try to echo that viewpoint in the chapters that follow.
I also find it useful to consider colleges and universities strategically. By this I mean, first, to model the institution through addressing its multiple internal levels and functions, from teaching to admissions, classrooms to libraries. Focusing on a single profession or campus function can provide depth to an analysis, but it risks losing a sense of an institution as a whole. Second, a campus-wide approach lets us consider the choices an institution faces, choices that affect all offices and professions.
This campus- and sector-wide approach also informed the research and professional practices that underpin the present book. I must refer again to my unusual career. For three years I have run a weekly videoconference about education’s future. Unlike most webinars, the Future Trends Forum consists entirely of conversations between me, guests, and hundreds of interested people from around the world. Guests and participants have included professors, librarians, technologists, college presidents, students, start-up founders, critics of startups, journalists, government officials, inventors, and people working in nonprofits and associations. They have been based in research universities, religious schools, community colleges, military academies, state universities, liberal arts colleges, and art schools, not to mention museums, archives, and libraries. Their cumulative experiences and thoughts have strongly shaped this book. That population along with thousands of others who read the Future Trends in Technology and Education report have contributed news stories, scholarly articles, and books from across a vast range of intellectual domains, all of which fed into this volume. Moreover, as I have traveled to speak and consult, even virtually, I have received a lot of feedback (and pushback) on the ideas they grew into this book’s arguments. I hope that the institutional and intellectual variety that these people have generously shared is manifest in the pages that follow. * * *
The first part of this book examines recent history for clues to the future. Each chapter addresses a different segment or stratum of ac-
ademia, identifying the most important trend lines. Taken together, the first six chapters may be considered a kind of snapshot of our time, a partial documentation of American higher education and its social, economic, and technological contexts in the early twenty-first century.
I begin chapter 2 with a discussion of forecasting methods. The first method is trend analysis, the identification of influential change drivers in the present and their extrapolation into the future. These change drivers occupy the first half of the book. The second method is the creation of scenarios, narratives of possible futures based on the outcomes of one or several trends. These scenarios appear in the book’s second half.
Chapter 3 explores the world of education in detail, including enrollment patterns, college sports, alternative certification, and the growth of higher education’s international market. Chapter 4 turns to two of the major contexts reshaping colleges and universities: demographics and macroeconomic forces. Aging populations that are unevenly distributed and rising income inequality are central to this section. Chapter 5 investigates developments in technology that can directly or indirectly reshape education. It covers a wide terrain, including automation, 3D printing, the ramifying device ecosystem, virtual/augmented/mixed reality, and social media. Chapter 6 explores trends stemming from the intersection of education and technology, such as learning management systems, the digital humanities, and automation on campus.
Part II uses a different methodology to offer scenarios of possible futures based on selected trends exerting a determining force. Chapter 7 imagines higher education after it has peaked, around the year 2012, and has moved downslope into institutional and sectoral decline. Chapter 8 contrasts this decline by envisioning an America where health care has become the nation’s leading industry, and how colleges and universities have been affected as a result. In chapter 9 we see academia enjoying the benefits and coping with the challenges of an open paradigm that has triumphed and remade the information
world. Chapter 10 takes a more optimistic tone still, forecasting a period of cultural creativity and its impact on postsecondary learning. Chapters 11 and 12 depict even stronger (or stranger) technological transformation as institutions delve deeply into augmented and mixed reality or automation. Chapter 13 imagines the reverse, a campus that energetically refuses twenty-first-century technology in order to relive what it sees as a better way of teaching, researching, and learning.
Part III takes us further into the future and then straight back to the present. With even more caution and trepidation we explore the world beyond the year 2040 in chapter 14, carefully trying to imagine possible academic entities. Chapter 15 then hauls the reader back to their present day, offering methodological and strategic ways of applying this futures work to our current colleges and universities. It focuses on our agency in addressing the future, helping us think through how we can act upon and intervene in the emerging nature of higher education.
A note on how to use this book: my intention is, first, to spark informed conversations. I hope that readers react and offer their own thoughts about where higher education may be headed. The chapters that follow cover a wide range of intellectual domains and practical problems. Many are challenging in themselves, and my assessments may appear to be incorrect. Trends can veer in wild directions, dropping out or accelerating. See where you think they might lead. Please push back, join in, or otherwise reflect out loud so that the general conversation becomes richer and more rewarding.
I want readers to feel some agency as they progress through this text. The accumulation of trends, metatrends, and scenarios may appear daunting over time, giving a sense of a future that’s inevitable or otherwise beyond human influence. Some may come to this book with a sense of fatalism or distrust of academia’s ability to change. Instead, please read with an openness to possibility; nothing here is written in stone. The future of academia is one we build together. May these chapters inspire each of you to take steps in shaping the best colleges and universities.
Before proceeding, we should set forth some limitations around the current project. To begin, this book focuses primarily on American higher education. Primary and secondary school worlds are rich and vital, but owing to space limitations they can only be touched on here insofar as they directly shape postsecondary institutions. (I regret this omission, as I sat on two school boards while writing this book.) We exclude corporate training for similar reasons. Both that field and K 12 deserve their own futures work.
Similarly, the vast world of global higher education beyond the United States appears only through a handful of trends, again for reasons of scope. I refer to the developing global higher education market and the increasingly globalized world of research insofar as they affect the American system. The full span of civilization-wide postsecondary learning would benefit from futures work as well. I hope to contribute to that work at a later date, either on my own or, better yet, in collaboration with an international team.
A third caveat concerns time. The present volume is largely limited to exploring the next decade and a half, aiming at a period ending roughly 2033–35. Only chapter 14 exceeds that remit and does so with a great deal of throat clearing, hedging, and trepidation, partly because of the weight of the trend method, which is best, in my estimate, at near-term and midterm futures work. There are also possibly chaotic changes settling in as we pass the century’s first third. Demographic, political, ecological, and especially technological developments that we can grasp now offer the possibility of a “VUCA” era, one marked by unusually high volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. We can speculate and think through that time, but it requires a different intellectual armature than the one deployed in the present work. Again, this may become the subject of forthcoming research.
A fourth limitation is that of genre. This book is a futures work, and despite the evidence we explore, it is not a work of history, nor is it a journalistic account of American higher education in 2019. Readers may extract some information along those lines, but that is
not the intent nor the structure of the text. Similarly, this book contains no narrative construction of American society in the early twenty-first century through 2019. As fascinating and revelatory is the story of American higher education from Harvard’s founding to the creation of land grant institutions by a Vermont senator during the depths of the Civil War, the shaping of liberal arts colleges, the GI Bill, Sputnik’s spur to science teaching, the enormous restructuring of the entire sector through the turbulent 1960s . . . we have time in the present volume only to reference rather than deeply develop that history. Instead, our account of American academia in this period is analytical rather than narrative, using the present and recent past as a springboard from which to launch into the future. We do take substantial time to assemble that springboard, if only to more carefully prepare the work of forecasting. Moreover, despite our futures orientation, this is not a work of science fiction, although one could consider parts of some of the scenarios to fall within that genre.
This book owes a great deal to thousands of people. Their insights, criticisms, and imagination have contributed enormously. Their stories constitute much of the materials in the chapters that follow. Any illumination, strategic benefit, or epiphanic understanding is theirs; errors and forecasts that veer wildly off the mark are solely my responsibility.
