How Higher Education is Going to Change
NOV 19, 2021George Leef
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2021/11/...oing-to-change/

Predictions that American higher education is on the verge of great change have been heard for quite a few years, but so far the system doesn’t look much different than it did twenty years ago. Perhaps the prognostications were wrong.

I have never doubted that higher education was on an unsustainable path and after reading The Great Upheaval by Arthur Levine and Scott Van Pelt, I’m more sure of that than ever. They present a convincing case that our higher education system will undergo a disruption that is “needed and inevitable.”

Levine and Van Pelt begin by examining three industries that have experienced profound change in recent years (music, film, and newspapers) and see the same factors that led to change in them asserting themselves in higher education.

First, whereas in the past, the institutions of higher education—our four thousand or so colleges and universities—were in control, the coming upheaval will put consumers in control. The authors write, “In the music, film, and newspaper industries, the industrial era was about institutions, the producers, and production of content. In contrast, the knowledge age focuses on the users of content—the consumers—and consumption. The consumer became the dominant force in the industry, and institutional control declined. That same transition can be expected in higher education.”

What will the rise of consumer control mean? It will mean that higher education services will be unbundled (colleges always loved selling big packages of education and experience to students, but that’s going to change), delivered around the clock rather than at times determined by the schools, and that educational content will increasingly be determined by what consumers want, not what institutions like to provide.

The transformation of higher education will be driven by new entrants into the market, just as occurred in music, film, and newspapers. As a result, consumers will find a much greater range of choice, at lower cost. Levine and Van Pelt point to some examples, such as Coursera, which offers classes, specializations, and certificates, Google’s badges for information technology, and the Museum of Modern Art, whose course on Postwar Abstract Painting has attracted 44,000 customers, many of whom find it professionally valuable.-- excerpt, rest at link above --