A Year of Wonder: What is the Future of Higher Ed?

It’s been the no-brainiest of no-brainers for as long as anyone can remember: If you’re a parent, and you have the means to do so, a mark of your commitment to your children is measured by the amount of money you’re able to sock away for their college education.

But what if it’s no longer true?

What if, in the wake of impending seismic shifts in higher education, the parents of today’s Kindergartners (aka the Class of 2032) need to stop worrying about their 529’s, and start preparing for a radically different landscape – one in which the very notion of “admissions” is an anachronism, the price tag is reasonable, and the experience doesn’t unfold over four years, but one’s entire life?

Before you block me from your Twitter feed for inanity, hear me out.

First, let’s consider the present state of higher education:

• Student debt is out of control. Whereas in 2004, the total amount of loans American college students had was around $250 billion, by the time today’s Kindergartner was born, that number had surpassed $1 trillion.
• Nearly half the students who begin college don’t finish within six years.
• It is now the norm for students in the bottom income bracket to borrow at least half their household income to attend a four-year college.
• And in the last twenty years, the average amount owed by a typical student has more than doubled.

Meanwhile, the majority of our colleges and universities are not even set up to give students an equivalent return on their investment: after all, the central function of the “hybrid university” is research, not teaching.

So what does that leave us with? An increasing disconnect between the skills young people have, and the skills their prospective employers need. As Forbes put it in 2014: “With the large numbers of recent college graduates who can’t find employment that pays well enough to justify the costs of going to college, it appears that we have reached the final stages of a process that has driven costs up but value down.”

Even the U.S. Department of Education sees the writing on the wall: “Today,” they write, “college remains the greatest driver of socioeconomic mobility in America, but if we don’t do more to keep it within reach for middle-class families and those striving to get into the middle class, it could have the opposite effect – serving as a barrier, instead of as a ticket to the American Dream.”

That’s bad news for middle-class families, but it’s devastating news for low-income families, who are constantly told that the only way to change their fortunes is by making sure the next generation is college-bound – despite the fact that just 9% of the country’s poorest students actually graduate with a bachelor’s degree by age 24 (as opposed to 77% of the wealthiest).

This is all starting to sound as sham-tastic as Trump University.

To be clear, the promise of college as a pathway to prosperity is still true for many – just not as many as before. Making college more accessible and affordable helped create the modern American middle class, thanks to policies like the G.I. Bill and the Higher Education Act. In fact, Title IV of the law focused on ensuring equal access for students from low-income families. It created support programs to help those students enroll in and afford higher education. And the 1972 reauthorization of the bill saw the beginning of the modern framework for federal student aid.

The problem is that while Congress has built out its own framework for federal aid, the overall costs of higher education have risen dramatically, resulting in a lower purchasing power for Pell Grants and a greater reliance on federal student loans. Consequently, whereas middle class kids can still get saddled with unwanted debt and a degree of limited utility, poor kids can get buried altogether.

This is not, therefore, merely a question of privilege. It’s a question of priorities – and of making sure that our institutions of higher education have the right ones.

The good news is there are more examples than you might think of colleges and universities that are changing their practices in ways that better serve the needs of kids and their families – and there are compelling reasons to think that by the time today’s five-year-olds graduate from high school, the landscape they face will be filled with options that are more personally relevant, affordable, and accessible.

If you’re looking for a future-oriented public university, for example, take a close look at Arizona State. As recently as a decade ago, ASU was little more than a party school with nice weather. Now, it’s the top-ranked university in the country for innovation – ahead of places like Stanford and M.I.T. Yet it’s still pretty affordable, and still pretty easy to get into.

And if you’d rather see how one of the world’s top universities is reimagining itself, check out Stanford 2025 – and see what you think of the creative ways they are redefining the structure and purpose of college (Goodbye Transcripts, Hello Skillprints). Or take note of Nike founder Phil Knight’s recent decision to give Stanford $400 million – not for its endowment or a new sports facility, but to create a new scholarship that recruits students from around the world to solve the world’s most intractable problems.

As Google’s Jamie Casap argues, this is precisely where education should be headed. Today’s students shouldn’t be thinking about what they want to be; they should be asking themselves what problems they want to solve.

Of course, that sort of shift requires a very different model of higher education – and a very different price point. But as Kevin Carey writes in The End of College, what schools like ASU and Stanford are showing us is where other universities will need to go if they want to survive. “To prosper,” he argues, “colleges need to become more like cathedrals. They need to build beautiful places, real and virtual, that learners return to throughout their lives. They need to create authentic human communities and form relationships with people based on the never-ending project of learning. They need to do it in ways that are affordable and meaningful for large numbers of people.”

For Carey and others, that means that many of the things we associate most strongly with “the college experience” may, once today’s Kindergartners reach university age, no longer exist. “The idea of ‘applying to’ or ‘graduating from’ colleges won’t make as much sense in the future,” Carey suggests. “People will join colleges and other learning organizations for as long or as little time as they need.”

Before that can happen, however, a vital monopoly must be broken: the sale of recognized credits and credentials. But Carey believes the exponential advances in information technology, coupled with the widening understanding of how people learn, will soon result in a digital marketplace of credentialing that reduces the diploma to its rightful, antiquated place. “The way the Internet allows people to connect with one another and share information creates new sources of authority that can be used to validate credentials,” he argues.

“They will allow people to control and display information about themselves in new and powerful ways, by assembling credible evidence of knowledge and skills gained in a variety of contexts – in college, in the workforce, in life.” And they will make each person’s educational identity “deep, discoverable, mobile, and secure.”

This is certainly the bet LinkedIn made when they spent $1.5 billion to acquire Lynda.com a year ago. It’s what new organizations like Accredible or Mozilla’s Open Badges platform are starting to develop. And it’s why some of the world’s top universities have combined to launch EdX and offer free online courses from top instructors.

So if all of these future-oriented efforts are already underway, why are they still at the margins of how we think about college?

Simply, because old habits die hard.

The comfort we get from continuing to imagine college as it has always been – as a symbol of acculturation and access, more than a vehicle to meaningful skills acquisition – will take a bit longer to collapse under the weight of its own untruth.

But make no mistake about it – we are already chasing chimeras. The unquestioned promise of college is, for too many, an illusion – and, worse still, an increasingly unaffordable and reckless one to pursue.

That means change is upon us. But perhaps by the time today’s five-year-old is graduating from high school, greater affordability, access and relevance will be, too.