The Great Upheaval: Higher Education's Past, Present, and Uncertain Future

by Arthur Levine

With near universal access to digital devices and the internet, students will seek from higher education the same things they are getting from the music, movie, and newspaper industries.

digital natives preferred anytime, anyplace access to education rather than set locations and times, education driven by the consumer rather than the institution, and digital over analog media.

With Coursera, the looming issue for higher education is not just the explosion of content but the world-class standing of Coursera providers. Nonelite universities may be particularly at a disadvantage in competing with industry giants. Students will have the option of studying at and obtaining certification from Google, an international powerhouse with the latest technology and top human capital or the usually more expensive, local, regional university. They will have the choice of studying at the American Museum of Natural History or MOMA, two of the foremost museums in the world, or at a nearby college.

The industrial era model of higher education, focusing on time, process, and teaching, will be eclipsed by a knowledge economy successor rooted in outcomes and learning.

higher education will have no alternative but to embrace outcomes and learning as the knowledge economy accounting system successor. The currency is now being called competencies, though the name may change.

The dominance of degrees and just-in-case education will diminish; nondegree certifications, and just-in-time education will increase in status and value.

nondegree certifications aren’t new to higher education, only calling them badges and microcredentials is.

a number of marquee employers have announced they will no longer require college degrees for employment, including Google, Ernst and Young, Penguin Random House, Hilton, Apple, Nordstrom, IBM, Lowe’s, Publix, Starbucks, Bank of America, Whole Foods, Costco, and Chipotle (Glassdoor Team, 2020).

the transition to competency-based education will be disorderly and chaotic as was the case with its predecessor, the Carnegie unit in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The universe of higher education providers will expand dramatically to include not only traditional institutions but also a far larger number of nontraditional content producers and distributors, including nonprofits and for-profits, ranging from corporations and museums to television networks and social media platforms.

Demand for just-in-time upskilling and reskilling will dwarf traditional just-in-case enrollments,

Certification at least in the short run will be a combination of degrees and microcredentials. The longer-run future of degrees is less certain—

Transcripts will become lifelong records of the competencies people achieve throughout their lives and the certifying authority for each.

The higher education faculty, whose numbers can be expected to decline, is currently composed of subject matter experts engaged in teaching and research. It will be diversified to include learning designers, instructors, assessors, technologists, and researchers, reflecting the demographics of the nation. The competition for this talent both within and outside higher education will be fierce. As in the film industry, talent is likely to overshadow institutions, and with an abundance of competing providers, an agent may be more valued than tenure.

This university is fundamentally different from its industrial era predecessor. The key actor is the student or consumer of higher education, no longer the colleges and universities that provide it. The focus is on learning rather than on teaching. The outcomes of education are fixed instead of time- and process-based. Higher education is primarily digital, no longer principally analog, and content is unbundled rather than consolidated. Competencies replace credits as the currency and accounting system of higher education. Colleges and universities are one of many sources for education rather than the sole provider.

research universities. They engage in both teaching and research. These universities carry out the basic and applied research that fuels the knowledge economy, and they prepare the people who carry out that work, the next generation of researchers.

There is also a growing mismatch between the high cost of residential education and the nation’s evolving population. The greatest growth will occur among the populations least likely to attend college and to afford the price of a residential college.

Once again, the institutions that survive by adaptation will have to refit themselves for the new world of the global, digital, knowledge economy. They will need to adopt the fundamentals of the new higher education model—become outcome-based with time and process variable curricula; trade Carnegie units for competencies; award both degrees and certificates; and diversify their faculties to include learning designers, instructors, assessors, and technologists that reflect the demographics of the nation. In short, they will take on the characteristics of higher education in the global, digital, knowledge economy but remain research universities and residential colleges.

Residential liberal arts colleges will persist as they have since the founding of the very first American college but in substantially reduced numbers owing to demographics and finances.

Relative advantage is the test of which sectors of higher education are most likely to be disrupted. By that standard, the institutions at greatest risk are regional universities and community colleges.

The first is that innovation travels from the periphery of higher education to the mainstream. The second is that innovation drives learners from the mainstream to the periphery of higher education.

online degree programs continue to be concentrated at the periphery, less so in the professions. Courses, programs, and even degrees have migrated to the mainstream, but the number of students seeking degrees are still increasing at the periphery.

Arizona State University is attempting to create what it calls the “Fifth Wave” university combining research excellence, cutting-edge technology, and a culture of diversity and access.

For the wealthier and more selective research universities and residential colleges, the time frame for change will be longer. In the decade ahead, they will have to adapt by piecemeal reform to a succession of challenges posed by new technologies, changing student demographics and expectations, and growing competition from alternative providers. They will also face shifting employer needs; the transition from time-based to outcome-based education; and growing demands for equity, accountability, and reduced costs as well as changing regulations.

The conclusion is that in the end the industry of higher education will be disrupted. Though every college and university will change, they will get to that end by different routes, over different time frames, and by varying means.

most misunderstood the nature of the pandemic. They viewed it as an interruption in doing business as usual rather than an accelerator of the changes to come.

To look forward rather than backward will require institutions to confront five forces that drive them to focus on the past rather than on the future. One is magical thinking, a belief that the challenges facing their institution will somehow vanish or fail to materialize. A second is complacency and an assumption of institutional exceptionalism, which holds each college to be special, ultimately shielding it from the woes confronting other institutions. Third is short-term rather than long-term vision and planning. Despite the frequency of five-year plans, there is a tendency for most institutions to think about their future a year at time, which discourages creative thinking and investing in the future. Fourth is a tendency to view failed attempts at innovation to be an affirmation of current practices. Finally, there is campus politics and the divides between administrators, faculty, and trustees, which planning for the future and the possibility of making significant changes promises to exacerbate.

A former university president, provost, and dean offered us this advice about how to proceed. “Don’t fight internal resistance. Work around it.” Either create a new subunit, as Southern New Hampshire University did, or a space at the periphery of the campus outside the academic core for innovation, as MIT has done. If that isn’t feasible, focus on the early or “first adopters.” There’s no sense trying to make believers of everyone. It only slows things down. Instead, find, incentivize, reward, and praise those who adopt new models and let them be the ones to talk the second wave of faculty into adopting the new.

Every institution of higher education must ask itself, “What business are we in?” This is not the same as asking, “What business are we in right now?” (for which the newspaper, railroad, and carriage business would have been correct answers).

Higher education is in the midst of a transformation. Of course, tomorrow will not be a repeat of yesterday.

Every institution or institutions in partnership need to establish a skunkworks to continuously determine where the puck is going to be, both in the short and long run—that is, a unit charged with monitoring the institution’s environment and developing solutions to respond to changes.

The job of the skunkworks is to communicate its findings to the institution, to use its research to identify the challenges and the opportunities facing the institution, to formulate the actions the institution should consider, and to serve as an incubator for new ideas flowing from that research.

“We’re trying to be an incubator. . . . If we do land on something that could be a new viable business model for education, the lab will incubate the idea until it’s ready to be pushed out on its own” (Hart, 2016, para. 7).

Any lingering distaste for career, professional, and practical education is fake history and a liability, too. The dichotomy between education for personal enrichment and education for participation in society, including the labor market, has always been a false one.

Make Institutions Distinctive, Give Them a Value Added or Plus That Distinguishes Them from Peers

In the global, digital, knowledge economy, the emphasis shifts to outcomes. In this world, equity takes on a new meaning—ensuring equal access to the same learning outcomes, providing students with the differential resources they require to achieve the same result.

If college access is to be a reality for the most disadvantaged Americans, the most underrepresented populations in higher education, the digital divide must be closed.

We need to provide all students not only with access to higher education but also with choice among higher education providers.

To make choice a reality, traditional institutions must reconfigure their activities to meet the needs of students who are not full time and residential, providing the convenience, service, instructional quality, and affordability of their nontraditional competitors. Federal, state, and promise financial aid programs need to expand beyond access to incorporate choice if they have not done so already.

With the waning of time-based education and the rise of outcome-based education, the highest priority is developing the fundamentals required for the transition—common definitions of competencies or outcomes, methods to assess them, credentials to certify their mastery, and a mechanism to record the competencies mastered throughout life.

the years ahead will bring massive changes to higher education that will require comparable changes in government regulation. The current accounting system for higher education and financial aid is credit-based. Government will need an outcome- and learning-based accounting system to replace it, which was discussed earlier.

government needs to place caps on higher education prices if institutions do not. This should be made a condition for participating in government financial aid programs. It requires a commitment from Washington and the states to provide the student support to make that possible.

The bottom line is that the shift of higher education to a global, digital, knowledge economy requires a fundamental rethinking of current industrial era policies. It’s time to launch that process and to institute three-year audits of current policy, emerging policy needs, and progress in meeting those needs.

as postsecondary education becomes more individualized and providers multiply, fewer students will be exposed to general education in college. This means the last common educational experience Americans will have is K–12 education. Our schools must be a bastion for building the bonds that unite us. Rather than teaching students the familiar disciplines and subject matters, general education should focus on the shared human experience—linking our past with our present and future, our heritage with the realities that will confront us today and tomorrow.

the last opportunity for students to learn about the common bonds that join us. What might those studies include? Were it up to us, we would suggest five subjects: 1. Communication using words, numbers, images, and digital tools; 2. Our shared heritage, institutions, activities, and planet—aesthetically, scientifically, and socially; 3. How to thrive in a diverse, interconnected, multicultural world; 4. How to live in a time of profound change and the essential skills it demands: creativity, critical thinking, and continuous learning; and 5. Ethics and values: the difference between right and wrong, the distinction between truths and falsehoods, the contrast between fact and opinion, the ability to identify logical fallacies, and the capacity to make wise judgments.

Higher education professionals, policy makers, and funders are being presented with a daunting and extraordinary opportunity to create the colleges of the global, digital, knowledge age. We cannot turn our backs on change. It will come anyway. This generation can shape the future of higher education or it will be shaped in spite of us.