It’s the year 2020 and the appearance of a new decade has many people looking ahead to see what might come up.
One example comes from Inside Higher Ed. John Kroger* offers ten predictions, and it’s a useful set to work through. It’s also a good example of the futures method of trend extrapolation.
In this post I’ll note and respond to each one, based on my future of education work. I’ll comment on both content and method.
One note: the author starts with present-day trends, then pushes them ahead a decade. This is a good exercise for anyone, and I appreciate it.
I’d add some others – heck, I track about 90 – but each of these are solid. That said, there are limits to this approach.
Each of the trends could stop, retreat, or just get weird. And each can elicit opposition in a kind of dialectic. I’ll list some below.
Now on to Kroger’s ten:
1. One Hundred Small Colleges Close
Economic pressure will increase on small rural colleges and over one hundred will close their doors. To survive today, a small college needs a great location, a large endowment, and a powerful brand. Schools with all three of those attributes will thrive. Schools with one or two will have challenges but get by. Schools without any of the three will fail.
This is a reasonable forecast, given the trends I’ve been tracking.
I’d go a little further and divide this into public and private institutions, which have very different dynamics. Then add responses to this, like state government policies and rising merger attempts.
2. Transformation of the NCAA
In the coming decade, large universities with big sports programs will pay their players, and application of anti-trust laws will lead to robust wage competition. Forty-five major sports universities will decide to compete.
buy finasteride online buy finasteride no prescription genericEveryone else will opt out, choose true amateur athletics, and Division I as we know it will implode.
This sounds like an improvement!
College sports is one part of academic I’m weak on, still, so I hesitate before adding much here.
3. Higher Education Finance Debate
Education costs will continue to rise above inflation, forcing a nationwide debate over higher education finance. Is higher education a private good, to be paid for with personal loans, or a public good, to be paid for with government grants? Congress will wind up greatly expanding Pell grants, and many states will adopt free community college, but a college education will remain increasingly unaffordable, leaving many more students opting for technical training instead.
A very interesting forecast, in that it suggests two divergent ways forward: some state support for some parts of higher ed, while the rest of academics keep shooting upward in price and inaccessibility.
This is a trend extrapolation, but one that leaves open different responses. Nicely done.
4. Continued Humanities Enrollments Decline
Humanities enrollments will continue to decline. Students at elite colleges and universities will continue to major in history and literature, confident in their long term job prospects, but everyone else will continue to move toward pre-professional degrees. Pundits will still insist that the liberal arts are the best career preparation, and they will be right, but that argument will continue to fail to get any traction – except with the wealthy, who already believe it.
This is a straightforward extrapolation of the present and recent past. It doesn’t allow for the trend to shift, being pessimistic about the humanities’ ability to turn things around and American culture’s current attitudes remaining stable.
Note the assignment of the humanities to the wealthy. Note, too, the conflation of humanities and liberal education.
5. Reinvention of Accreditation
Accreditation currently does little to advance quality assurance, and the process is slow, expensive, unwieldy, and bureaucratic. This cannot continue. Moving forward, accreditation leaders will begin to set objective outcome and finance standards and reinvent their processes, to focus more on quality and results and less on bureaucratic box-checking.
This is one of the most important items in the list. It addresses one of the least-discussed parts of higher ed, and thinks it’ll become more significant than it is now. And that’s not implausible. I’ve heard murmurs of this kind of thing from some accreditors.
Methodologically, it’s good to see a relatively obscure trend highlighted. For many, accreditation is academia’s dark matter
6. Disruption
People have been predicting for decades that technology would disrupt higher education, but little has changed. The reality is that technology does not disrupt industries – more agile and sophisticated companies do. Given the deep frustration of the tech industry with the current state of education, expect companies like IBM, Microsoft, Facebook and Google to enter the K-12 and higher education space not just as software providers, but as education providers with their own suites of learning management software, courses, and credentials. The tech companies will enter the space as part of their competition for mindshare, but the end result will be to push aside many traditional higher education providers.
A very interesting forecast. Note that it doesn’t see any academic entities or other nonprofits entering that disruption space, which is quite an assessment. Instead, it focuses on the business sector, and in particular the very large tech companies as leading actors.
I do wonder about the last two sentences. One focuses on class technology, rather than content, which is what we’re seeing now.
7. Tenure Crisis
Currently, we have a two tiered faculty system. Only 25 percent of faculty are tenured or on tenure-track and have acceptable wages and benefits, while 75 percent are adjuncts, with very low pay, no security, and no benefits. As universities fight to stay afloat financially, use of cheap adjunct labor will increase to a crisis point, with frequent strikes and demands by adjuncts that compensation pools currently paying for tenure track faculty be shared with them. In response, some universities will abandon both tenure and the exploitative adjunct model entirely and adopt a new paradigm. Faculty will not have tenure, but fixed period contracts with contractual guarantees of academic freedom and bonusses for high teaching performance evaluations and outstanding research outcomes. Compensation will fall in the middle of the current spectrum, lower than current tenure track salaries, but much higher than what adjuncts are currently paid, with benefits the norm.
Another extrapolation from present day trends, but this time to a breaking point, complete with labor unrest and serious institutional shifts.
8. Increase in Inequality
As education prices increase, and public financing decreases, many elite private colleges and universities will deemphasize equity in admission in favor of revenue generation. Private elite colleges and universities will revert to their role prior to enactment of the G.I. Bill, propping up wealth and privilege, and that will be increasingly acceptable to wealthy families familiar with the model from private K-12 education.
Another theme my readers will recognize. Again, this is an extrapolation of a current trend.
However, it leaves off the non-wealthy. I’d like to hear more about the date of non-elites, including community colleges, many state universities, religious private colleges, and so on.
9. Expanded University-Corporation Research Partnerships
As lab and research costs explode, the complexity of research problems escalates, and federal research funding continues to dwindle, expect more high-profile partnerships between universities and corporations who depend on research to drive their bottom line. This, in turn, will drive down basic research in favor of work with clear profit potential.
A very important forecast, and one based on present day reality. Note the shift from state to federal policies here. Note, too, the emphasis on the big picture: a sea change in basic research.
10. U.S. Exports More Students
As domestic education costs continue to rise, expect more U.S. undergraduate students to seek out less expensive options in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Though this will hurt U.S. institutions, it will produce a more geopolitically aware American population.
Agreed, at least the first part. I find few in American academia are thinking of this, but it’s a potentially powerful force.
Overall, a solid forecasting article, especially given its brevity. Keep an eye on these.
(Ten-ball photo by Fabio Hofnik)
*I’m not sure who John Kroger is. The article lacks the customary bio blurb. The author’s name has a link, but that just defaults to the Inside Higher Ed main page. Could it be this John Kroger, former president of Reed College?
“Could it be this John Kroger, former president of Reed College?”
Correct, I don’t know why his IHE bio has become so skeletal or even non-existent, but it used to describe both of his recent major job moves: from the Reed College presidency to a research faculty position or the like at the Kennedy School to “Chief Learning Officer” for the US Navy … I don’t think that gives him literal authority over the US Naval Academy and other institutions of higher learning for the US Navy but he presumably is in a position to influence them academically at least.
Point 10 is our current reality. My youngest son attended the University of Leiden honors college in the Hague for his undergraduate degree and is currently in a joint graduate program with Tufts and the College of Europe. Not only was the education excellent and academically rigorous, but the cost was very reasonable and the housing superb. He’s not the only one. A number of his classmates have done the same, either in the Netherlands or other parts of the world. The Dutch have created some exceptional options – definitely a trend to watch and not underestimate.
A solid forecast by Kroger, but he’s way too conservative in saying only 100 colleges will close. I think it will be many more than that. He says some colleges will continue to “thrive,” but I don’t see that at all. Every college will see hits to its enrollment. Nowhere does he mention the potential effects of alternative credentialing and direct-to-work employer-provided job training. These will deal a devastating blow to enrollments.
I’d love to see number two happen, but the deep-pocketed NCAA will fight like crazy to prevent this from happening, and lobby Congress into watered-down compromise. The clueless fans and alumni, and even players, all of whom still subscribe to the idiotic “amateur scholar-athlete” nonsense, will probably accept scraps off the NCAA’s table in the form of increased stipends, endorsements, transfer rights, etc. instead of the full professionalism and decoupling from universities that should occur.
As Glen McGhee commented in the IHE thread for Kroger’s predictions, the factor to override all others is the whopping $1.6 debt. It is having a devastating effect on the entire economy. If that bubble pops and/or we have a deep economic recession, it may precipitate a wholesale higher ed meltdown.