How will the COVID-19 pandemic change what higher education teaches?
Many of us have been exploring how colleges and universities will conduct their educational mission over the next several semesters. That’s a vital question, of course. But in this post I’d like to ask you all to think about what campuses will teach. Consider the next term (summer) as well as the next academic year, 2020-2021.
To begin with, certain programs and areas may increase in campus support and student enrollment. There’s a lot of demand for more front-line medical staff, from nurses to first responders. Less discussed but still needed are other professions within the full allied health spectrum as COVID-19 infections keep building: medical technicians, anesthesiologists, occupational therapists, mental health therapists, office managers, medical IT services, and more. For example, Harvard (!) just launched an online medical ventilation class. I should expect many campuses to try expanding their health care offerings across the board. This should occur both in the undergraduate and grad school realms.
EDITED TO ADD: public health majors and classes should also see an upward spike in demand.
What other fields will receive a boost?
On the undergraduate side I would guess students will flock in even greater numbers than they already do to business and economics as the economy staggers to its knees. Campus administrations may grow those sections and classes as they see a need to rebuild the economy.
Will politics, poli sci, and government grow? I’m thinking of election year boosts, which may be traditional, and heightened by this year’s unusual election. But I wonder as well about the need to understand nations and localities under the pandemic’s great stresses, especially if civil unrest occurs and/or emergency measures are implemented. I can imagine special topics classes, as well as campuses urging students into those majors or minors as part of higher ed’s civic mission.
I expect a bunch of pandemic- and plague-themed classes to appear across the curriculum. Think of plagues seen through lenses of history, philosophy, religion, anthropology, cultural studies, etc. I’ve already offered a syllabus for a literature class. Will pandemic studies programs appear, at least as minors or interdisciplinary initiatives? EDITED TO ADD: Oberlin College is offering an interdisciplinary class on the pandemic itself, “Uncovering COVID-19: Critical Liberal Arts Perspectives.”
What will happen to graduate programs beyond the health care field? Will some number of grad students alter their research to meet the present urgency, bending (say) an anthropology dissertation on death rites to focus more on rituals around fatal disease?
On the flip side, the amount or range of subjects offered might shrink, thanks to ongoing challenges heightened by the pandemic’s fierce economic pressures. During yesterday’s Future Trends Forum our guests considered what spring term 2021 might look like. One of their responses included “fewer programs”:
A glimpse of academia in 2021 from this afternoon's conversation:
-fewer programs
-" students
-economic upheaval
-more partnerships#FTTE— Bryan Alexander (@BryanAlexander) April 9, 2020
This could take the form of academic program prioritization – i.e., when a campus deciding which programs bring in the greatest number of students or revenue (not necessarily the same) and diverting resources to them, while cutting programs on the other end of the spectrum. Economic collapse will certainly drive this kind of thinking in general, but the pandemic should give it additional contours. Think of arguments to cut (for example) literature classes, because it’s more important to fund expanded health care offerings. Academic program prioritization can become ferocious exercises in micropolitics; the current atmosphere suggests they’d become even more intense. For some number of colleges and universities – maybe a lot of them – these arguments will occur under the aegis of institutional survival.
We could also see other stakeholders or outside players pressuring campuses to make curricular changes. State governments, already dealing with the double blow of recession and pandemic (think of growing health care costs, expanding public services) could well urge/lobby/seek to compel universities to follow the curricular patterns outlined above.
How will foundations, governments, and nonprofits respond through their grants processes? To what extent will businesses try to adjust what post-secondary education teaches?
Over to you now. I’d like to raise this as a topic for discussion. Are you seeing any evidence of higher education’s curriculum starting to change in the wake of COVID-19?
PS: one satire.
(photo by Plan de Alfabetizacion Tecnológica Extremadura; thanks to my wife for the Harvard link; thanks to Obie Jason Mittell for the Oberlin example)
I don’t dispute the trends or expectations you are imagining. It it interesting, however, in an ironic way, that the humanities will likely suffer the most, because these are the historical moments that benefit most from the broad perspectives of humanities research. This period will not only offer an incredibly rich trove of information to serve academic scholars across the curriculum and be the source of dissertations for decades, but it is also events such as these that similarly inspire artistic reflection and output for decades as well.
Good points. It’s going to be harder to do this work.
I’m wondering if there will be, especially in your neck of the woods, an increase in graduate and undergraduate courses on boosting competence among government agencies, processes, teams and personnel. This crisis has highlighted the sheer lack of competence in the US government, both among politicians at all levels and among the overall governing infrastructure. It’s costing tens of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars and it needs to be reversed as quickly as possible.
That’s a good point: in poli sci, government, IR classes.
We have been told to tighten our belts, to expect no merit-pay increases, and to live with a hiring freeze and delays on building renovations.
We are well managed and have a large endowment, but the letter we all received noted, wisely, that we just cannot predict the effects of this crisis on enrollment. God help those schools, especially smaller ones, without deep pockets. No changes to the curriculum will save some of them.
Good luck, Joe.
Any sense of how UR’s curriculum will change?
We are in the midst of voting on a new Gen-Ed curriculum. I think that would proceed but implementing a new curriculum would be delayed.
No hint of any cuts to existing programs. There is a major initiative for a Humanities Center, as these programs remain stable, even growing, at UR. I worry most, short-term, about our Focus on study abroad and recruiting large numbers of international students. I suspect that this will be mostly a problem next year .
Joe, You know that DeVos/Jones are moving away from faculty “voting” on curriculum changes in regard to online programs? See here:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2020-05700.pdf
https://www.educationdive.com/news/ed-dept-issues-proposed-distance-learning-rules-emphasizes-flexibility/575323/
I hope she and her evil crew of dismantlers will be gone in 2021, but in any case, we are a private university.
I have to believe there will be an increase in statistics classes versus calc for introductory-level mathematics. Can see more students interested in stats and probabilities, reading data sets, creating forecast models, etc. after Covid-19.
Good points, Mike. Clever math departments will take advantage.
I doubt it. Given the demographic changes, and now Covid-19 driven the economic downturn and school closures, the pool of students is shrinking, making significant increases in statistics classes less likely.
The other mistake here is that all learning is classroom based. Papers available at Scholar dot google dot com and youtube lectures make self-study the way to go. Tuition is simply too high right now.
I have been observing accreditation agencies for years, and I am worried about their finances.
ACICS, for example, will vanish, and the schools that jumped ship when they had the chance, will be happy that they did — *assuming* that their new accreditor, either Distance Education & Training Council (DETC) or Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges (ACCSC) does NOT suffer the same fate.
It will be worth watching to see what programmatic accreditors survive — what school fighting for their own survival will bother? Then again, it could give that school a competitive edge over its competitors. Certainly something to watch.
Regionals were also struggling. On the one hand, there will be fewer reviews (who wants to travel now?), no more visitations (physical visitations are required by federal law, but given the CORVID-quake, no one cares anymore), no more standards (DeVos/Jones gang saw to that regarding online — up to 50% now online delivery can be from unaccredited sources… it’s a mess!). But, following CORVID-quake, and the CORVID Gap after that, regionals are also irelevant.
When the revenue short-fall hits, accreditation agencies will shutdown.
Once accreditation stops, Title IV effectively ends — either that, or it needs to be reinvented from the ground up.
Without Title IV, not only do the public colleges close down, but for-profits as well.
Here’s a monthly timeline, courtesy of Matt Reed at IHE on 3-23-2020
March: The economy comes to a screeching halt, with total shutdowns of most local retail and the attendant loss of jobs.
April: States see tremendous drops in sales tax revenue from the sales that weren’t made, coming simultaneously with large unbudgeted expenditures for health care.
May-June: States enact massive cuts to everything discretionary, with public higher education taking its usual disproportionate share of the cuts (remember that states can’t run deficits).
June-August: Brutal financial triage on campuses, declarations of financial exigency, mass layoffs, some campus closures.
September: Smaller entering classes at many campuses make bad budgets worse.
https://insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/want-save-colleges-save-states
Matt and I are on the same page.
But say more, Glen, about why the regional accreditors will no longer be relevant?
What will accreditation look like post-Covid-19? Good question.
Peer review and accreditors’ administrative capacity are all being hit by Covid-19. The thousands of volunteers that run accreditation will stay home, and so will staff.
Schools finances are now in worse shape than just a few months ago, and what is coming will be even more sobering. There won’t be any money to pay for association dues and review reimbursements, especially with so many schools closing. Programmatic reviews are most at risk, but institutional accreditors need to be able to weather the pandemic. If not, associations may be forced to merge, or, as Claude Pepper proposed decades ago, form a national association. There would be numberous benefits for this, including the standardization of accreditation reviews and minimum standards across geographic regions.
But the future of accreditation looks murky. We don’t know how long the pandemic will last, or how it will change higher education in America. We do know one thing, and that is, it is changing us all, including colleges and universities and the way they are accredited.
I would expect overwhelming support of the Disaster Research Center programs, and of disaster theory in particular.
https://sites.udel.edu/eemconcentration/
https://www.drc.udel.edu/education/undergraduate
https://www.drc.udel.edu/education/graduate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_disaster