The Future and Higher Education
While there is enormous and increasing pressure on universities, the primary challenge is less about keeping everything the same as it has always been, but in the words of higher education foresight researcher and author Dr. Maree Conway - asking ourselves how to best design the university the future most needs?
What is the future of higher education? Everyone knows it is changing...but changing how? And what does it mean to be ready?
Our work in the PSU Futures Collaboratory is dedicated to building university-wide capacity to:
Think collectively about our shared aspirations for the future - and explore dynamics that might accelerate or impede them.
Assess how to create a future that best meets out equity, justice and community-centered values - and increase the synergy and engagement of everyone who is part of our university community in envisioning and working towards what comes next.
Cultivate skills and perspectives that imaginatively expand a narrow range of options.
Build relationships through shared learning and application of state of the art futures and foresight tools, expertise and ideas to support our development.
Develop a long-term mindset, resist short-term thinking as an automatic reaction, and become more "future ready" together.
Use all of this to help address current challenges with an expanded mindset.
Prior to covid-19, this was the discourse about higher education tended to focus on:
"National crisis" language, mergers and closures, partisan and bipartisan political pressure, increasing expectations - with generally decreasing funding.
Context of higher education grappling with complexity.
Technology and higher education creating new "requirements" and also additional kinds of risks, opportunities and costs.
Increasingly unequal in terms of racial bias, access and supports for success - and yet simultaneously more required for economic mobility.
New "knowledge" coming faster and more intensely than at any time in recorded history.
Technical and climate change themselves playing an increasing role in how we think about what happens next (Bryan Alexander, 2020).
During covid-19 (and national racial reckoning) disourse expanded to include:
Financial vulnerability and brittleness - especially for strained public sector and smaller liberal arts universities/colleges.
Imperative of racial justice redesign and reconfiguration to better attract, welcome and support BIPOC faculty, staff and students.
The importance of higher education in actively participating in a recovery plan for the United States via local communities.
The (perhaps permanently) shifted context of the future of learning (distance learning normalized) and the future of work itself.
In short - there are new forms, new formats, new players, new credentials, new tools, new risks, new skills - how will we prepare?
Enter futures thinking!
Key questions:
•How do we become “foresightful” as a sector (and specifically as a university)?
•How do we use our collective intelligence and imagination to “think beyond” the way things are now? The future can evolve in many directions – the future is plural. We don’t normally stretch these muscles - especially during periods of ”survival” focus. This is not superficial “positive thinking” – this is deeper disciplined mental shifting.
•How do we find agency amid dark projections? How do we find a vision of specifically how we will be part of the recovery and transformation of our community?
•Strategy is not enough any more – strategic planning needs a revision - to better anticipate, imagine and create needed momentum.
See our weekly "open channel" of higher education futures signals and information.
Some books and sites to explore on the future of higher education:
Alexander, B. (2020). Academia next: The futures of higher education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Aoun, J. (2017). Robot-proof: Higher education in the age of intelligence. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Review here.
Connel, R. (2019). The good university: What universities actually do and why it’s time for radical change. London: Zed Books. Review here.
Crow, M.M. & Dabars, W. (2020). The fifth wave: The evolution of American higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, MD. Link here.
Davidson, C. (2017). The new education: How to revolutionize the university to prepare students for a world in flux. New York: Basic Books. Review here.
Gidley, J.M. (2016). Post-formal education: A philosophy for complex futures. New York: Springer. Link here.
Hamilton, L.T. & Nielsen, K. (2021). Broke: The racial consequences of underfunding public universities. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL. Link here.
Staley, D.J. (2019). Alternative universities, speculative design for innovation in higher education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Review here.
Warner, J. (2020). Sustainable. Resilient. Free: The future of public higher education. Cleveland, OH: Belt Publishing. Review here.
Suggested Reads:
New report from Chronicle of Higher Ed - The Trends Report 2021
Recorded Interviews/Presentations
Big Rethink Project and Big Rethink - Future of Higher Ed Webinar Series (based on converging issues of Covid-19 and Racial Reckoning - sponsored by Georgetown University)
Contested ideas for the future of universities - UNESCO Futures Forum, Paris, 2019, Maree Conway, Futurist. (Her website is here.)
Websites to Connect with for Additional Valuable Information
Bryan Alexander (author of Academia Next mentioned above. His website is a deep well of changing information.)