More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 17 - August 23, 2022
The United States is hurtling from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, knowledge economy.
knowledge economies are fueled by minds and information.
Higher education will need to be refitted for the global, digital, knowledge economy. This can be accomplished either by renovating the existing institutions or by replacing them.
The postsecondary leaders we read, interviewed, and listened to consistently criticized higher education for being overpriced, low in productivity, slow to change, dated in content, and poor in leadership.
The First Industrial Revolution produced what today would be called disruptive innovations in four distinct but interrelated areas—manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and communications.
During the Second Industrial Revolution, change was faster, deeper, and more extensive. This was a revolution powered by petroleum and electricity rather than by water and steam. It was a revolution built of steel rather than wood.
innovation needs to be compatible with the values of the university that hosts it.
in this era of profound change that it might be a good idea to pause and consider whether gradual change would be adequate or whether more sweeping institutional transformation was required of colleges.
each failure at reform revealed more about the requirements for success. Money, leadership, support within the academic community, compatibility with institutional norms and values, and timing were essential as were garnering enrollments and the willingness of families to send their children. A good location was also an asset.
One of the postwar models resembled Jefferson’s College, the land-grant college. In 1862, the federal Morrill Act gave states an opportunity to establish colleges designed to straddle the agrarian and industrial eras. Washington offered each state a grant of thirty thousand acres of land for each senator and representative it had in Congress. The land was to be used or sold to fund at least one college that combined the liberal and practical arts, offering instruction in agriculture and the mechanical arts “without excluding scientific and classical studies and including military tactics”
...more
Charles Eliot was the pivotal figure in the transformation of higher education. He was the banished prince who had become king, presiding over America’s oldest and one of its wealthiest and most prestigious colleges, located in the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.
Raising faculty quality was a priority. Professors had to be paid higher salaries. Class sizes and workloads needed to be cut, beginning with eliminating faculty responsibility for petty student discipline. And the pressure to carry out original research had to be resisted.
Higher education’s growth was anarchic, chaotic, and disordered as institutions added a seemingly endless number of new degrees, adopted a cornucopia of new programs of dramatically varying quality and design, hired new staff with little common experience or credentials, and admitted and graduated new students employing a kaleidoscopic range of standards.
The United States does not have a ministry of education that oversees education nationally. Rather, the Constitution assigns that responsibility to each of the states.
Today, higher education has become the engine that drives the global, digital, knowledge economy. The difference, as noted earlier, is that the information economy is fueled by knowledge and minds rather than by natural resources and physical labor of the industrial era. It’s an economy that feeds on research and demands the most highly educated labor force in human history. Massachusetts recently became the first state in the nation in which the majority of its workforce is college educated.
Reform initiatives, largely piecemeal innovations aimed at modernizing institutions and often intended to make them more distinctive and competitive, are everywhere.
In 1976, there were 55 degree-granting proprietary or for-profit schools. By 2019 that number had risen nearly fourteenfold to 742
We name periods of profound change only in retrospect. It’s the historian’s job.
To address the division between those who say higher education will meet the demands of the emerging global, digital, knowledge economy by adaptation and those who believe the future will bring disruption, “Looking Forward” concludes that colleges and universities will be able to meet the challenges of demographic and economic change, principally by adaptation. However, the jury is still out on digital technology.
By 2045, whites will make up a minority of Americans (49.8%). Hispanics will constitute nearly a quarter (24.6%) of the population. Blacks and Asians together will represent another fifth (21%) of the nation.
Race is another umbrella term that incorporates a range of subgroups with widely varying characteristics.
the nation’s education system has not been successful with today’s emerging majority, and the pandemic put these students further behind.
Accommodating each new population has required changes in higher education, often carried out grudgingly and with glacial speed, in curriculum, staffing, campus culture, physical plant, finances and admissions, and retention practices.
higher education is one of the few industries in which competition actually increases cost. Called “the arms race,” colleges compete by attempting to surpass one another in staffing, plant, programs, and services, a practice that produces excessive and unproductive cost hikes. Imagine if airlines competed in this fashion. They might slash the number of seats on each plane, substitute plush and roomy lounge chairs, introduce three-star cuisine, and perhaps employ a live string quartet on each flight and, of course, jack up prices to pay for it.
Even before the pandemic, a conservative estimate in New England is that at least 30 percent of institutions were at risk of closure (confidential). A potential fatality is the historic liberal arts college. Its future, definitely in diminished numbers, is uncertain given both the closures/mergers and vocationally oriented curriculum changes designed to increase their market appeal.
the culling ahead is likely to strengthen higher education in the Northeast and Midwest by eliminating the weakest institutions and redistributing their students to healthier peers.
Colleges and universities are already contending with another age-related challenge. Levine and Dean (2012) found that traditional-aged students 18 to 22 years old differ markedly from their older classmates. Older adults are more likely to be women, attend college part time, come to campus just to go to classes, work longer hours, and have a host of off-campus responsibilities, including jobs, families, spouses/partners, noncollege friends, and an off-campus community life. Among students who are 25 or older, 51 percent are parents (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2018; Marcus, 2019).
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
There is likely to be an explosion of niche programs, small specialized initiatives designed to reach out to specific segments of the population—single moms, seniors, returning students—
Although twenty-first-century skills vary from author to author, they tend to cluster in two groups. One group focuses on skills essential to succeed in a time of profound and continuing change, including critical thinking, creativity, continuous learning, problem solving, adaptability, and the like. The other cluster focuses on the areas in which change is currently occurring, such as technology and media literacy skills, reflecting the nation’s shift from an analog to digital technology; cross-cultural competence, rooted both in America’s increasing population diversity and globalization;
...more
The shift from an industrial to a knowledge economy has revolutionary implications for higher education because industrial economies are rooted in fixed time and processes and knowledge economies are grounded in fixed outcomes.
In the knowledge economy, higher education can be expected to shift from standardizing time and process to adopting uniform student outcomes. This represents a transformative change of greater magnitude than any of the changes discussed so far.
If time is fixed, then outcomes will necessarily vary. If outcomes are fixed, students will require varied amounts of time to achieve them.
five digital technologies that we know will powerfully affect the future of society and higher education: (1) the internet, (2) mobile devices/computers, (3) big data, (4) artificial intelligence (AI), and (5) virtual reality / augmented reality (VR/AR).
it’s not technology unless it happens after you are born. If the technology existed before you were born, it’s a fact of life, a given.
digital natives are being taught by digital immigrants at predominantly analog colleges and universities.
Each day, 2.5 quintillion (15 zeros) bytes of data are produced (Petrov, 2020).
big data refers to data sets that have until recently been too big or too complex for traditional data processing.
There is an old joke that the factory of the future is likely to be a machine, a person, and a dog. The dog would be there to make sure the person didn’t touch the machine.
Research indicates that somewhere between 5 percent and 47 percent of all jobs will be lost to automation in the next ten to twenty years (Manyika et al., 2017; Frey & Osborne, 2013).
At the moment, the jobs that are most likely to be resistant to automation, beyond those requiring expertise in the design and development of automation systems, involve nonroutine physical and manipulation skills, creative intelligence (e.g., creating and valuing), and social intelligence (e.g., negotiating, persuading, and caring) (Frey & Osborne, 2013).
most Americans will need lifelong upskilling and reskilling of their job skills and knowledge, which will require a very different kind of education than colleges have historically provided.
Upskilling and reskilling will produce a burgeoning demand, likely larger than the current college population for just-in-time education, the education required to give students the skills and knowledge they need right now, as in: “teach me the newest programming language by Thursday.”
Just-in-time education requires transcripts that record all of the credentials earned in the course of a lifetime rather than the experience at a single institution.
colleges. They too need one foot in the figurative library, humanity’s accumulated knowledge, and one foot in the street, the real world as it exists today.
higher education has done well to maintain its foothold in the library but has lost its hold on the street, where the change is occurring in real time.
Digital technology has the potential to be a game changer with the capacity to fundamentally transform higher education.
Institutions in the Midwest and Northeast desperate to increase enrollments in the face of declining college-aged populations may serve as laboratories for innovation,
When societies change quickly, their social institutions fall behind as is the case with the rise of the knowledge economy. The lag causes the institutions to be criticized, scrutinized, and challenged regarding their efficiency and effectiveness. As long as they are perceived to be out of date, too exclusive, or too costly, they invite competitors to challenge them.
Campus-based colleges will continue, but it remains to be seen whether virtual higher education will become the norm.
Institutional control of higher education will decrease, and the power of higher education consumers will increase.
