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The future of higher education: what it means for students and educators.

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The Future of Higher Education What It Means For Students and Educators

“The idea that one can earn a degree at the age of 22 and be set for a career has become as antiquated as the pocket watch.”

—Jeffrey R. Brown, dean at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, from his position paper: “ It’s Time to Transform Higher Education ”

• How do we prepare students and workers to do jobs that don’t even exist yet?
• For challenges we can’t even imagine yet?
• To compete in industries and with business models that haven’t even been invented yet?

Higher education is facing one of its biggest periods of unknowns in recent memory. There’s not a single person or aspect of education that hasn’t been utterly shaken by the pandemic.

But that’s not the only source of uncertainty. Technology changes so fast, the skills we master in school are constantly changing and becoming outdated in a matter of years. Some of the most exciting career opportunities might be for roles that don’t even exist yet in industries we can’t even imagine.

We must acknowledge the pace at which technology evolves, and the extent to which the traditional model limits access to education. Experts across higher education suggest that education should look less structured and make room for more variety: calling for new paths, multiple streams, a wider array of credentials — so people can reskill as needed and put those skills to work immediately.

One of those experts is Jeffrey R. Brown, dean at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, author of this report: “ It’s Time to Transform Higher Education .”

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He argues that to fully embrace their missions, higher education institutions and educators must think differently about the suite of educational “products” they offer. In his report, he calls for “new forms of content delivery, new ways to assess learning, and new ways to certify that a learner has mastered various concepts and skills.”

I had a conversation with him to explore those ideas further. He started with a reminder of the original purpose of higher education.

“If we go back to the classical, liberal education, the idea was to make us more rational, more thoughtful, more informed citizens,” he said. “And that has benefits not only to the individual receiving the education, but also to society at large – to teach us that there's a bigger world out there, to think about the world's problems.”

Higher education used to be a luxury for a small segment of society, but it’s become more of a necessity for people to be able to thrive, take care of their families, and solve the grand problems of the world. He said there’s still a role for traditional education, but what we also need today is lifelong, skills-based training that is available to people at any point in their lives.

“That's the transformation that needs to take place,” said Brown. “We're working with a very old model, and that old model is not as well-suited to the needs of today's citizens.”

He outlined three main ways higher education needs to evolve.

Transformation in higher education: 3 ways to make it more accessible, lifelong and skills-based

1. The future of higher education is democratized. He wants to democratize education by taking advantage of technology.

“We need to use technology to expand our educational offerings to be less expensive, to work around people's work and family lives, and to reach people who are not fortunate enough to live in an area where they have access to top scholars and top universities.”

2. The future of higher education is individualized. Once you're operating at scale and with technology, you can individualize education. He recommends expanding our idea of what types of credentials are valued – getting beyond the four-year degree to include sub-degrees or less-intensive credentials, certificates, or digital badges. Some people don’t necessarily need to spend two years getting an MBA, but they could benefit from learning cutting-edge material in business, finance or analytics. There should be recognized credentials for doing so.

“It might be enough for me to take three courses in these areas that I really need right now to reach that next level of excellence in my current job. I can individualize my educational needs to where I am in my life, where I am in my career.”

3. The future of higher education is accessible. He talked about breaking down the many barriers that exist for people to get the education they want. Those barriers might be that it’s too expensive, they’ve got a family and a full-time job, or there are no good schools within a 50-mile radius of their home. Leaders can demolish those barriers with some intentional design.

“We've tried to design our program not just in terms of your ability to choose content, but also with some scheduling flexibility to accommodate when you're able to jump in and out – to truly make it more accessible.”

For more insights on the future of higher education, listen to our conversation below.

Future Generations and Higher Education: Students need to Lead the Way

I have a seven-year-old daughter, so I asked Brown: What's the higher education experience going to look like for her?

“Children need to learn how to learn in multiple environments,” he said. “I know the pandemic was a painful time for lots of school-aged children. But they're going to need to learn to navigate in a world where they have face-to-face interaction, online interaction and, increasingly, virtual interactions – using augmented or virtual reality. Getting exposure to a wide range of learning modalities, in addition to a wide range of fields and materials, is going to be really important.”

Leaders in higher education, take note: change is coming whether you’re ready or not. As Brown put it: “You've basically got three choices. You can lead. You can be a very fast follower. Or you can become irrelevant.”

Higher education has been through the ringer over the past few years. Make sure you don’t simply rebuild what you’ve been doing since the 1600s and miss your opportunity to evolve.

"What makes a great leader today is the ability to tolerate and even welcome a future that's unknown," said Wendy York, dean of Clemson's Wilbur O. and Ann Powers College of Business.

Are you ready to adapt? If you can’t change your institution, how can you claim the ability to shape the next generation of leaders that society needs?

To learn more about how leaders are preparing for the future of higher education, register free for the virtual version of the 2022 Leadership in the Age of Personalization Summit hosted by Clemson University’s Wilbur O. and Ann Powers College of Business on October 14.

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How Technology Is Changing the Future of Higher Education

Labs test artificial intelligence, virtual reality and other innovations that could improve learning and lower costs for Generation Z and beyond.

By Jon Marcus

This article is part of our latest Learning special report . We’re focusing on Generation Z, which is facing challenges from changing curriculums and new technology to financial aid gaps and homelessness.

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Cruising to class in her driverless car, a student crams from notes projected on the inside of the windshield while she gestures with her hands to shape a 3-D holographic model of her architecture project.

It looks like science fiction, an impression reinforced by the fact that it is being demonstrated in virtual reality in an ultramodern space with overstuffed pillows for seats. But this scenario is based on technology already in development.

The setting is the Sandbox ColLABorative, the innovation arm of Southern New Hampshire University, on the fifth floor of a downtown building with panoramic views of the sprawling red brick mills that date from this city’s 19th-century industrial heyday.

It is one of a small but growing number of places where experts are testing new ideas that will shape the future of a college education, using everything from blockchain networks to computer simulations to artificial intelligence, or A.I.

Theirs is not a future of falling enrollment, financial challenges and closing campuses. It’s a brighter world in which students subscribe to rather than enroll in college, learn languages in virtual reality foreign streetscapes with avatars for conversation partners, have their questions answered day or night by A.I. teaching assistants and control their own digital transcripts that record every life achievement.

The possibilities for advances such as these are vast. The structure of higher education as it is still largely practiced in America is as old as those Manchester mills, based on a calendar that dates from a time when students had to go home to help with the harvest, and divided into academic disciplines on physical campuses for 18- to 24-year-olds.

Universities may be at the cutting edge of research into almost every other field, said Gordon Jones, founding dean of the Boise State University College of Innovation and Design. But when it comes to reconsidering the structure of their own, he said, “they’ve been very risk-averse.”

Now, however, squeezed by the demands of employers and students — especially the up and coming Generation Z — and the need to attract new customers, some schools, such as Boise State and Southern New Hampshire University, are starting labs to come up with improvements to help people learn more effectively, match their skills with jobs and lower their costs.

More than 200 have added senior executives whose titles include the words “digital” or “innovation,” the consulting firm Entangled Solutions found; many were recruited from the corporate and tech sectors. M.I.T. has set up a multimillion-dollar fund to pay for faculty to experiment with teaching innovations .

Some colleges and universities are collaborating on such ideas in groups including the University Innovation Alliance and the Marvel Universe-worthy HAIL Storm — it stands for Harvesting Academic Innovation for Learners — a coalition of academic innovation labs.

If history is a guide, the flashiest notions being developed in workshops in these places won’t get far. University campuses are like archaeological digs of innovations that didn’t fulfill their promises. Even though the biggest leap forward of the last few decades, for example — delivering courses online — appears to have lowered costs , the graduation rates of online higher education remain much lower than those of programs taught in person .

“One of the most important things we do here is disprove and dismantle ideas,” said William Zemp, chief strategy and innovation officer at Southern New Hampshire University.

“There’s so much white noise out there, you have to be sort of a myth buster.”

But some ambitious concepts are already being tested.

College by Subscription

One of these would transform the way students pay for higher education. Instead of enrolling, for example, they might subscribe to college; for a monthly fee, they could take whatever courses they want, when they want, with long-term access to advising and career help.

The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the places mulling a subscription model, said Richard DeMillo, director of its Center for 21st Century Universities. It would include access to a worldwide network of mentors and advisers and “whatever someone needs to do to improve their professional situation or acquire a new skill or get feedback on how things are going.”

Boise State is already piloting this concept. Its Passport to Education costs $425 a month for six credit hours or $525 for nine in either of two online bachelor’s degree programs. That’s 30 percent cheaper than the in-state, in-person tuition.

Paying by the month encourages students to move faster through their educations, and most are projected to graduate in 18 months, Mr. Jones said. The subscription model has attracted 47 students so far, he said, with another 94 in the application process.

However they pay for it, future students could find other drastic changes in the way their educations are delivered.

Your Teacher Is a Robot

Georgia Tech has been experimenting with a virtual teaching assistant named Jill Watson, built on the Jeopardy-winning IBM Watson supercomputer platform. This A.I. answers questions in a discussion forum alongside human teaching assistants; students often can’t distinguish among them, their professor says. More Jill Watsons could help students get over hurdles they encounter in large or online courses. The university is working next on developing virtual tutors, which it says could be viable in two to five years .

S.N.H.U., in a collaboration with the education company Pearson, is testing A.I. grading. Barnes & Noble Education already has an A.I. writing tool called bartleby write , named for the clerk in the Herman Melville short story, that corrects grammar, punctuation and spelling, searches for plagiarism and helps create citations.

At Arizona State University, A.I. is being used to watch for signs that A.S.U. Online students might be struggling, and to alert their academic advisers.

“If we could catch early signals, we could go to them much earlier and say, ‘Hey you’re still in the window’ ” to pass, said Donna Kidwell, chief technology officer of the university’s digital teaching and learning lab, EdPlus.

Another harbinger of things to come sits on a hillside near the Hudson River in upstate New York, where an immersion lab with 15-foot walls and a 360-degree projection system transports Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute language students to China , virtually.

The students learn Mandarin Chinese by conversing with A.I. avatars that can recognize not only what they say but their gestures and expressions, all against a computer-generated backdrop of Chinese street markets, restaurants and other scenes.

Julian Wong, a mechanical engineering major in the first group of students to go through the program, “thought it would be cheesy.” In fact, he said, “It’s definitely more engaging, because you’re actively involved with what’s going on.”

Students in the immersion lab mastered Mandarin about twice as fast as their counterparts in conventional classrooms, said Shirley Ann Jackson, the president of Rensselaer.

Dr. Jackson, a physicist, was not surprised. The students enrolling in college now “grew up in a digital environment,” she said. “Why not use that to actually engage them?”

Slightly less sophisticated simulations are being used in schools of education, where trainee teachers practice coping with simulated schoolchildren. Engineering students at the University of Michigan use an augmented-reality track to test autonomous vehicles in simulated traffic.

A Transcript for Life

The way these kinds of learning get documented is also about to change. A race is underway to create a lifelong transcript.

Most academic transcripts omit work or military histories, internships, apprenticeships and other relevant experience. And course names such as Biology 301 or Business 102 reveal little about what students have actually learned.

“The learner, the learning provider and the employer all are speaking different languages that don’t interconnect,” said Michelle Weise, chief innovation officer at the Strada Institute for the Future of Work.

A proposed solution: the “interoperable learning record,” or I.L.R. (proof that, even in the future, higher education will be rife with acronyms and jargon).

The I.L.R. would list the specific skills that people have learned — customer service, say, or project management — as opposed to which courses they passed and majors they declared. And it would include other life experiences they accumulated.

This “digital trail” would remain in the learner’s control to share with prospective employers and make it easier for a student to transfer academic credits earned at one institution to another.

American universities, colleges and work force training programs are now awarding at least 738,428 unique credentials , according to a September analysis by a nonprofit organization called Credential Engine, which has taken on the task of translating these into a standardized registry of skills.

Unlike transcripts, I.L.R.s could work in two directions. Not only could prospective employees use them to look for jobs requiring the skills they have; employers could comb through them to find prospective hires with the skills they need.

“We’re trying to live inside this whole preindustrial design and figure out how we interface with technology to take it further,” said Dr. Kidwell of Arizona State. “Everybody is wrangling with trying to figure out which of these experiments are really going to work.”

This story was produced in collaboration with The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

Reimagining higher education in the United States

Higher education in the United States is at an inflection point. The core mission of the university—instruction, research, and service—has not changed. Nor has the need for advanced education to prepare individuals for a fulfilling life and to drive the knowledge economy. For individuals, the economic benefit of earning a college degree remains clear. College graduates are on average wealthier, healthier, and happier over a lifetime. 1 William R. Emmons, Ana H. Kent, and Lowell R. Ricketts, “Is college still worth it? The new calculus of falling returns,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, 2019, Volume 101, Number 4, pp. 297–329, stlouisfed.org.

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, however, the higher-education sector faced significant challenges. Consider student completion: only 60 percent of all those who started college actually earned a degree within six years in 2017 (the latest year for which data is available). The figures are even worse for Black (39.9 percent) and Hispanic (54.4 percent) students. Other troubling disparities persist. In student enrollment, for example, 69 percent of white high-school graduates enroll in college, compared with 59 percent of Black high-schoolers and 61 percent of Hispanics. Furthermore, the level of student debt is rising, while repayment rates plummet, creating a potentially unsustainable burden for many students.

The pandemic is intensifying these challenges and creating new ones. Students and their families are struggling with the impact of campus shutdowns and questioning whether it is worth it to pay for an on-campus experience when much of the instruction is being done remotely. Under these circumstances, the risk of outcome inequities—from completion to employment to lifetime earnings—could worsen. For example, evidence suggests that lower-income students are 55 percent more likely than their higher-income peers to delay graduation 2 Esteban Aucejo et al.,“The impact of COVID-19 on student experiences and expectations: Evidence from a survey,” Journal of Public Economics , August 2020, sciencedirect.com. due to the COVID-19 crisis. Underpinning all of these challenges is a business model at its breaking point, as institutions face falling revenues and rising health-and-safety costs.

In short, the coronavirus has confirmed the case for fast and fundamental change. It has also demonstrated that change is possible. When the pandemic hit, many US colleges and universities moved quickly to remote learning and other delivery models, launched affordability initiatives, and found creative ways to support their students. Now is the time to build on these lessons to reimagine the next five to ten years and beyond.

With that in mind, we pose five questions for US higher-education leaders to address as they look to the future. For each question, we describe the current conventional wisdom and then make the case for challenging it—to the benefit of students, faculty, staff, institutions, and society.

What makes our university distinctive?

The conventional wisdom: To successfully attract students and maintain competitive national rankings, colleges and universities must be well rounded.

National-ranking systems emphasize admissions selectivity, small class sizes, per-student spending, and standardized test scores. Focusing on this narrow set of variables can incentivize institutions to make strategic and operational choices that may boost their rankings without necessarily improving their core educational missions. It may also lead to greater homogenization in the higher-education landscape.

Instead, there may be more benefit to creating thoughtful differentiation, building on the institution’s existing strengths, resources, and local context. The question to ask is: “What should my institution be known for?” There are many ways to differentiate, including student mix and outcomes, faculty development, research capabilities, facilities, and community impact. Doing so may serve institutions and their students better than the conventional wisdom for three reasons.

First, identifying and prioritizing what makes an institution distinctive can be a competitive advantage that attracts committed students and faculty. Second, specializing—doing fewer things better—could improve outcomes. And third, creating a distinctive profile can be a source of resilience, enabling institutions to survive after a crisis.

Such differentiation will be critical given the trends that are challenging the higher-education sector. One trend is the coming “demographic cliff”—the number of high-school graduates in the United States will peak at around 3.6 million students in 2026 and then decline to 3.3 million students by 2030. Another is the drop, since 2016, in international-student enrollment, an important source of revenues for many colleges. The COVID-19 crisis could well accelerate this decline. A third trend is the competition for research funding. In terms of the percentage of GDP and of budget allocation, federal investment in R&D has fallen steadily since the 1960s (although it has risen in absolute terms, and in the past two decades, nonfederal investment has grown, too). Moreover, about 35 percent of federal funding went to just 22 schools in 2018. Given these constraints, leaders need to ask how research can serve their institutions and identify where they stand the best chance of attracting faculty and funding.

By defining their areas of distinction and then directing resources to support them, higher-education institutions can set themselves apart—making them stronger and enabling them to deliver high-quality programs and outcomes.

How can we build a diverse and inclusive institution?

The conventional wisdom: Current efforts are likely to fulfill diversity and inclusion (D&I) goals in a reasonable time frame.

Higher-education institutions have been at the forefront of recognizing, and taking steps to foster, D&I. Many feature chief diversity officers, D&I curriculum requirements, and training sessions on implicit bias, as part of the growing diversity infrastructure. Even so, there are sizeable gaps. College enrollment and completion rates for Black and Hispanic students are much lower than for their white or Asian counterparts. Another area to address is the student experience itself. According to a 2019 study, Black, Hispanic, and first-generation students report a lower sense of belonging at four-year schools (but not at two-year schools). 3 Shannon T. Brady et al., “College students’ sense of belonging: A national perspective,” Educational Researcher , 2020, Volume 49, Number 2, pp. 134–37, sagepub.com.

Faculty composition is even less representative. In 2017, only 6 percent of full-time faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions were Black and 6 percent were Hispanic, compared with 14 percent and 18 percent of the US population, respectively. Women make up only 33 percent of full-time professors.

Doing more of the same, then, is not enough, and time is of the essence because of changing student demographics. Between the 2012–13 and the 2031–32 academic years, the proportion of high-school graduates who identify as Asian and Hispanic will grow to 31 percent, from 24 percent, of all students.

There is evidence from the business sector that prioritizing D&I as a core value is sound management. McKinsey research has consistently found that  businesses with top-quartile diversity on executive teams were likelier to have superior results; in the latest results from the 2019 study, companies with top-quartile ethnic and gender diversity were 36 percent and 25 percent, respectively, more likely to have above-average profitability. While the analogy between executive teams and higher education administrations is not precise, it is likely that campuses, like the C-suite, would benefit from a more diverse leadership composition.

Current higher-education D&I efforts are necessary yet insufficient, particularly given how the COVID-19 crisis is disproportionately impacting the lives, livelihoods, and education of Black and Hispanic Americans. Leaders must, therefore, act with a sense of urgency, seeking opportunities to strengthen D&I across their institutions—from redesigning student recruitment to updating faculty-performance measurement to account for the significant roles that under-represented faculty often play in mentoring to the social and academic experiences to postgraduate success. To do so may require new strategic initiatives and accountability measures, such as sharing the breakdown of tenure appointments by ethnicity and creating programs to encourage opportunities for intergroup dialogue and promote cross-race understanding. 4 This constitutes McKinsey’s view on best practices and optimized environments. Legal restrictions, however, could affect universities’ ability to adopt them; they should consult their legal counsel to understand any implications created by the recent “Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,” September 22, 2020, whitehouse.gov.

What services are necessary to create a high-quality student experience? And what aren’t?

The conventional wisdom: In addition to learning, higher-education institutions must be responsive to a wide range of student wants and needs.

The core mission of colleges and universities is instruction, research, and service. In recent decades, though, many have engaged in the so-called student-amenities arms race, with expansive offerings in areas such as entertainment, gourmet dining, and wellness. Higher-education institutions want to deliver an enjoyable experience, and of course some student services are essential, especially those related to physical and mental health. But it is notable that since at least 2010, the costs for student services have risen much faster than costs for instruction and research (Exhibit 1). While this spending does include some core services, this trend may no longer be sustainable for many institutions.

Spending on student services has been growing four times as fast as spending on instruction.

Chart summary.

Although more than half of total spending at four-year universities was invested in research and instruction, growth over ten years since 2007 showed 0.3% less was spent on research and only 0.5% more on instruction. Meanwhile, 8.5% of the total was invested in student services 4 , the largest area of growth in spending per student (2.1%) over ten years.

1 Adjusted for inflation.

2 Includes expenses for the day-to-day operational support of the institution. Includes expenses for general administrative services, central executive-level activities concerned with management and long-range planning, legal and fiscal operations, space management, employee personnel and records, logistical services such as purchasing and printing, and public relations and development.

3 Includes expenses for activities and services that support the institution's primary missions of instruction, research, and public service.

4 Includes expenses for admissions, registrar activities, and activities whose primary purpose is to contribute to students' emotional and physical well-being and to their intellectual, cultural, and social development outside the context of the formal instructional program. Examples include student activities, cultural events, student newspapers, intramural athletics, student organizations, supplemental instruction outside the normal administration, and student records.

Source: College Scorecard; Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (CPI); National Center for Education Statistics Trend Generator

McKinsey & Company

One of the most difficult things to do on a college campus is to stop doing something. That said, some institutions have shown how to make such tradeoffs. Spelman College, for example, announced in 2012 that it would drop competitive intercollegiate sports in favor of expanding campus-wide health and fitness programs. This exact tradeoff is being faced again, and some institutions are making the difficult choice to trim athletics; most notably, in July 2020, Stanford announced it will permanently cut 11 athletics programs.

While students surely appreciate things like luxury gyms and other services, there is a need to distinguish between what students like and what is necessary to serve the core education mission. Given the budget stresses of the COVID-19 crisis, higher-education institutions may want to consider providing fewer, better ancillary services, while keeping the broader well being of their students in mind.

What delivery channels and models should we use to fulfill our core educational mission?

The conventional wisdom: The best college experiences and educational outcomes are delivered in person, on a residential campus.

The quad, the ivy, the lecture hall, the dorm, the tailgate parties: these are some of the well-known totems of the quintessential college experience. These images are ingrained; they are also part of the reason why many (and maybe most) traditional four-year, higher-education institutions were slow to adopt new methods and technologies, such as remote instruction and competency-based learning that have the potential to advance student success while also lowering costs.

Global private investment in learning-technology companies has been growing fast, from $2 billion in 2012 to $19 billion in 2019. Areas such as online-learning management systems and innovations such as virtual-lab applications and immersive story learning are beginning to spread. And the COVID-19 crisis hustled even reluctant students and institutions into action. In 2018, only about 35 percent of undergraduates took a distance-education course. This year, that figure is close to 100 percent, as the pandemic forced the adoption of remote learning.

In 2018, only about 35 percent of undergraduates took a distance-education course. This year, that figure is close to 100 percent.

Institutional acceptance of the online delivery model also may be increasing. According to a poll of 2,000 US faculty members by Inside Higher Ed and Gallup in October 2019 5 Doug Lederman, “Professors’ slow, steady acceptance of online learning: A survey,” Inside Higher Education, October 30, 2019, insidehighered.com. —that is, well before the COVID-19 crisis—39 percent fully supported the increased use of education technologies, up from 29 percent in 2017. And a national survey of more than 4,000 faculty members earlier this year 6 “Time for class: COVID-19 edition,” Tyton Partners, July 2020, everylearnereverywhere.org. found that 45 percent had a better opinion of remote learning since the pandemic began; fewer than one in five (17 percent) had a more negative perception.

Remote and online learning are here to stay. The need is to determine what combination of remote and in-person learning delivers the highest educational quality and equity. As institutions refine this hybrid model, they have a once-in-a-generation chance to reconfigure their use of physical and virtual space. They may be able to reduce the number of large lecture halls, for example, and convert them into flexible working pods or performance spaces. Or they could reimagine the academic calendar, offering instruction into the summer months.

What is our business model?

The conventional wisdom: The current higher-education business model, which relies heavily on ongoing tuition increases, can be sustained.

For decades, the financial model of US colleges and universities rested on two revenue streams. Student tuition and fees were the most important; the rest came from a mix of different sources, such as athletics, research grants, endowments, and government appropriations, that varied greatly. Both revenue streams are now under stress. These unprecedented times require a reimagined business model that protects the core educational mission and financial viability of the institution, while limiting economic burdens on students.

As mentioned, athletics, research grants, and other revenue sources are sputtering in the pandemic. But the bigger stress is on tuition and fees, which comprise at least half of revenues for about 55 percent of four-year private nonprofit institutions in the United States; meanwhile they account for more than a third of revenues for about 30 percent of public institutions. Even before the COVID-19 crisis, administrators realized that they had limited scope to increase tuition; now it has become even more difficult to do so.

Two issues threaten the traditional tuition-reliant financial model. First, there is affordability. To offer financial aid, institutions manage a complicated pricing system in which higher-income and international students effectively subsidize needier ones. This lack of price transparency feeds into the perception of the increasing costs—and unaffordability—of college. In fact, from 2007–17, net costs rose only 4 percent , reversing the trend of previous decades. Yet the perception of unaffordability means that some young people might be discouraged from trying to attend: they see the high sticker prices and assume that they are priced out.

Second, there are also questions around the value of higher education when debt levels and repayment rates are considered. Median student debt levels have climbed by 45 percent since 2006, while repayment rates have dropped by 24 percent since 2009 (Exhibit 2). The situation appears to be worsening; in 2016, only 6 percent of students  were at colleges where students left with moderate debt and managed high repayment rates, compared with 54 percent in 2009. The situation is even worse for students who incur debt but don’t graduate and, therefore, don’t benefit from the income-raising advantage of a degree.

The COVID-19 crisis could accelerate these trends. In our April 2020 student survey , 45 percent of prospective students cited cost as extremely important in selecting a college, 44 percent of students who switched schools between January and April did so to save money, and 30 percent reported that the COVID-19 crisis was likely to have a strong or extremely strong impact on their ability to afford college.

Another important factor is to ensure students realize an economic return on their investment in higher education; without that assurance, young people will not be willing to enroll in the first place, or finish. Colleges are under pressure to ensure that students don’t just graduate with a degree, but with a pathway to sustainable employment that secures a reasonable standard of living.

Given these financial constraints, it is not surprising to see consolidation. Since 2000, there have been about 100 higher-education mergers in the United States, 7 John Hanc, “For some colleges, the best move is to merge,” October 10, 2019, New York Times , nytimes.com. and more are likely. The Pennsylvania State University system, 8 Jan Murphy, “Pa. state system of higher education exploring costs of combining some universities,” July 16, 2020, Patriot-News , pennlive.com. for example, is considering restructuring the different institutions in the system. Properties, buildings, and talent from less-affluent campuses may well become available. An interesting example comes from Connecticut, where three schools are buying the assets of the University of Bridgeport 9 Goldie Blumenstyk, “The edge: As colleges’ finances get shakier, what lessons does this ‘sorta’ merger offer?”, July 8, 2020, Chronicle of Higher Education , chronicle.com. ; the latter’s academic programs will continue for the time being, while other operations, such as the library and security, are shared.

The opportunity—indeed, the necessity—is to reimagine higher education financials so that students do not find themselves mired in debt. There is little room to increase tuition, and there are also challenges to other revenue sources, such as athletics and research funding; education leaders must therefore ask how they can reevaluate their spending and/or reallocate existing resources.

Colleges and universities must reimagine their business models and consider new ways to operate—either on a standalone basis or through partnerships that accomplish the same goals, at lower cost.

How do we challenge the conventional wisdom?

Higher-education leaders face a complex situation, negotiating how to manage the COVID-19 crisis in a context of economic, demographic, and technological challenges. At the same time, universities have a reputation for making decisions slowly. “It’s easier to change the course of history,” the saying goes, “than it is to change the history course.” The deliberate, and deliberative, nature of university governance has many benefits, but it can also be a hindrance to decisive action. That said, many university leaders have reacted creatively and swiftly to meet the challenge of protecting their communities’ health while delivering on their educational mission.

Three mechanisms can help universities to sustain this momentum: planning, stakeholder engagement, and board governance:

• Plan ahead. Responding to a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic requires leaders to take decisive short-term actions. But they also need to dedicate time to develop longer-term strategic thinking. One way to do so is to create plan-ahead teams  that include people identified as future leaders. The team should be tasked with developing scenarios, recommending actions, and identifying trigger points for escalation to the university’s board and administrative leadership.
• Stakeholder engagement. Universities should engage early and often with important stakeholder groups—including faculty, staff, students, and parents—when making critical strategic decisions. Leaders must be transparent about decision-making processes, establish clear timelines, and meet them. By embedding engagement into decision making, rather than as an afterthought, the shared governance culture of higher education can be respected, while still allowing universities to act quickly.
• Board governance. In moments of crisis, boards can play a critical role. But that role must not slip into micro-management. Board members should evaluate their operating model—the board’s size, structure, and decision rights—to ensure they provide the necessary governance without interfering with administrators.

This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that universities will need to adapt. “The inertia of a massive university is formidable,” noted Harvard President Charles W. Eliot in his inaugural address. “A good past is positively dangerous, if it makes us content with the present, and so unprepared for the future.”

President Eliot made those remarks in 1869. The time to prepare for a new future is now.

André Dua is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Miami office; Jonathan Law  is a senior partner in the New York office; Ted Rounsaville is a senior expert in the Washington, DC, office; and Nadia Viswanath is a consultant in the San Francisco office.

The authors wish to thank Arthur Bianchi and Kathleen Zhu for their contributions to this article, as well as the hundreds of university leaders who shared their experiences and perspectives with us.

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What the Future of Education Looks Like from Here

• Posted December 11, 2020
• By Emily Boudreau

After a year that involved a global pandemic, school closures, nationwide remote instruction, protests for racial justice, and an election, the role of education has never been more critical or more uncertain. When the dust settles from this year, what will education look like — and what should it aspire to?

To mark the end of its centennial year, HGSE convened a faculty-led discussion to explore those questions. The Future of Education panel, moderated by Dean Bridget Long and hosted by HGSE’s Askwith Forums , focused on hopes for education going forward, as well as HGSE’s role. “The story of HGSE is the story of pivotal decisions, meeting challenges, and tremendous growth,” Long said. “We have a long history of empowering our students and partners to be innovators in a constantly changing world. And that is needed now more than ever.”

Joining Long were Associate Professor Karen Brennan , Senior Lecturer Jennifer Cheatham , Assistant Professor Anthony Jack, and Professors Adriana Umaña-Taylor and Martin West , as they looked forward to what the future could hold for schools, educators, and communities:

… After the pandemic subsides

The pandemic heightened existing gaps and disparities and exposed a need to rethink how systems leaders design schools, instruction, and who they put at the center of that design. “As a leader, in the years before the pandemic hit, I realized the balance of our work as practitioners was off,” Cheatham said. “If we had been spending time knowing our children and our staff and designing schools for them, we might not be feeling the pain in the way we are. I think we’re learning something about what the real work of school is about.” In the coming years, the panelists hope that a widespread push to recognize the identity and health of the whole-child in K–12 and higher education will help educators design support systems that can reduce inequity on multiple levels.

… For the global community

As much as the pandemic isolated individuals, on the global scale, people have looked to connect with each other to find solutions and share ideas as they faced a common challenge. This year may have brought everyone together and allowed for exchange of ideas, policies, practices, and assessments across boundaries.

… For technological advancements

As educators and leaders create, design, and imagine the future, technology should be used in service of that vision rather than dictating it. As technology becomes a major part of how we communicate and share ideas, educators need to think critically about how to deploy technology strategically. “My stance on technology is that it should always be used in the service of our human purpose and interest,” said Brennan. “We’ve talked about racial equity, building relationships. Our values and purposes and goals need to lead the way, not the tech.”

… For teachers

Human connections and interactions are at the heart of education. At this time, it’s become abundantly clear that the role of the teacher in the school community is irreplaceable. “I think the next few years hinge on how much we’re willing to invest in educators and all of these additional supports in the school which essentially make learning possible,” Umaña-Taylor said, “these are the individuals who are making the future minds of the nation possible.”

Cutting-edge research and new knowledge must become part of the public discussion in order to meaningfully shape the policies and practices that influence the future of education. “I fundamentally believe that we as academics and scholars must be part of the conversation and not limit ourselves to just articles behind paywalls or policy paragraphs at the end of a paper,” Jack said. “We have to engage the larger public.”

… In 25 years

“We shouldn’t underestimate the possibility that the future might look a lot like the present,” West said. “As I think about the potential sources of change in education, and in American education in particular, I tend to think about longer-term trends as the key driver.” Changing student demographics, access to higher education, structural inequality, and the focus of school leaders are all longer-term trends that, according to panelists, will influence the future of education. 

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Report on the Futures of Higher Education envisions collective and holistic responses to global challenges

On May 25, 2021, the report  “ Thinking Higher and Beyond: Perspectives on the Futures of Higher Education to 2050 “  was launched at a virtual meeting attracting over 500 attendees. The report is the result of a collective and creative process of discussions around the role of higher education globally. Two questions guide this work:  how would you like higher education to be in 2050?  And  how could higher education contribute to better futures for all in 2050?

• Values such as respect, empathy, equality, and solidarity should be at the core of future higher education institutions and their missions
• Higher education can be shaped as a public good and as a driver of social and economic development of countries and regions
• To democratize digitalization,  higher education actors should advoca te for the right to connectivity, to a device, and to networking, e.g. throug h learning hubs
• Higher education institutions should be at the forefront of tackling the climate crisis and other global challenges,  through knowledge production and technology incubation and transfer, and integrating climate change education into learning

The aim of this report compiled by the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC) has been to gather the wide-ranging points of views of  25 global higher education experts  who were invited to participate in this phase of the  Futures of Higher Education  project. Through written concept notes and participation in online workshops, experts’ knowledge and ideas were mobilized to create the report, which sets out the possibilities for different, better futures for higher education. “We are concerned not only with forecasting the futures, interpreting the futures, and critiquing the futures of higher education, but also with creating, not just the possibility but the reality of alternative futures for higher education,” explains Francesc Pedró, Director of IESALC, in the foreword.

Framed within the  UNESCO  Futures of Education  initiative , the report highlights four key messages for higher education towards 2050: 1.  To  take active responsibility in the development of the potential of all humans ; 2.  To  promote wellbeing and sustainability,  oriented towards justice, solidarity, and human rights; 3.  To  draw strength from interculturality and diversity, respecting  cultures and identities, and creating spaces for dialogue; 4. Finally,  to  create and uphold interconnectedness,  for ging  collaborations between local and global communities, and bonding higher education with other levels of education, including non-formal and informal learning.

Shaping the purposes of higher education

As part of the curatorial work done by the UNESCO IESALC analyst team, quotations or ideas attributed to a certain expert are included in the report and are shown below with their name in brackets.

According to one of the report’s statements, higher education needs to shape within a public good model, which “has been decisively demonstrated during the Covid-19 pandemic to be able to better sustain stable institutions” (Simon Marginson). Higher education institutions can harness their “collective disruptive thinking” ( Sir Hilary  Beckles) to support a shift in global and regional development paradigms, thus incorporating higher education as a driver of social and economic development in countries and regions.

Within the public good model, one example of how governments could provide free higher education for all could be through a “Global Learning Fund” ( Nagla  Rizk) that  would oblige economically richer countries and global businesses to contribute a portion of their profits to subsidize higher education across regions . Conceptualizing higher education as an interconnected ecosystem would enhance collaboration and make it more connected, externally and internally, with the other ecosystems with which it is entangled (Ronald Barnett), such as knowledges, other social institutions, and the economy.

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the enhanced need for global cooperation in research, innovation, and enhancing scientific capacities. Responses to global challenges such as this will be at the heart of future international cooperation, underpinned by values of integrity and equitable access that should also be reflected in how higher education institutions are led and governed.

Photo (from left to right, top to bottom): Dzulkifli (Dzul) Razak; Sara Maneiro (moderator); Patricia Mariella Ruiz Bravo Lopez; Ahmad Y. Majdoubeh; Takyiwaa Manuh; Emma Sabzalieva (UNESCO IESALC), and Rajani Naidoo at the webinar that marked the official launch of the report, on 25 may 2021

The collective response: education with a soul   

In this route to strengthening the role of higher education, a more humane higher education for all is needed, to include more of the most vulnerable and traditionally excluded groups “such as out-of-schoolers, women, unemployed youth and persons with disabilities, indigenous communities in accordance with the broader objective to leave no one behind” ( Dorcas Beryl  Otieno). Higher education needs to be more responsive to diversity, attracting indigenous learners, ethnic minorities, refugees, and/or from under-served groups to create spaces for dialogue. After Covid-19, higher education institutions should work to reduce the digital divide, “to ensure that the integration of technologies into education is well supported” ( Mpine  Makoe) by access to the internet and devices and support to staff.

The integration of disciplines is also recommended because “new knowledge can emerge from hybridity” ( Ahmad Y.  Majdoubeh). Within this frame, the arts and sciences are invited to intertwine with innovation for an “integral education” (Ruiz  Patricia Mariella  Bravo López), aligned with “education in peace and human rights” ( Felisa  Tibbits), and an education that emphasizes the human dimension, including problem-solving, project work, entrepreneurship, climate change ( Pankaj  Mittal).

Values such as respect, empathy, equality, and solidarity will be at the core of future higher education institutions and their missions. In other words, “education with a soul” that “prepares learners not only for livelihood but for life” ( Dzulkifli  Razak), supporting them “to be better citizens, more aware of their civic and environmental responsibilities” ( Jocelyne  Gacel-Ávila). Learners should be tolerant regardless of gender identities, sexual preference, class, language, ethnicity, and other markers that often describe or define people and are divisive. Critical thinkers are needed to counter prejudices and fake news.

Download the report in  English , en  français , en  español .

IESALC’s initiative continues  to explore new perspectives on the paths to 2050. A public consultation on the futures of higher education was opened on 25 May, inviting everyone – of all ages, all occupations, and all locations – to complete a short online survey to have their say. The public consultation is available in  English ,  French  and  Spanish 

Related content: Gathering global expertise on the futures of higher education

Other recent press releases

UTA and UNESCO IESALC look together into the futures of higher education

Reflections on a new educational social contract

Public consultation on the futures of higher education marked by global participation

“If we start acting now, in 2050 we could have equal access to technology and more critical citizens” / Ibercampus

The UNESCO Roadmap for the Transformation of Higher Education: No More Business as Usual. An Interview with Francesc Pedró

#25Nov Webinar | Pathways to 2050 and beyond: Findings from a public consultation on the futures of higher education

Dialogues around the transformation of higher education during and in the post-pandemic

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