Continuing Trends in Higher Education
On the morning of July 31, I attended the first keynote speaker of the Minnesota eLearning Summit on the Saint Paul campus of the University of Minnesota. Teacher and futurist Bryan Alexander spoke on “Higher Education and Weirder Technologies in the 2020s.” He outlined the more prominent trends, both in education specifically and in North American culture generally, that he could trace through statistical and anecdotal evidence. While I couldn’t detect any larger generalizations from his agglomeration of data, I think I can recall through my notes a few of the categories of trends he described. Many of these trends I have heard elsewhere reported in the media, but it was interesting to hear them addressed collectively and, I should add, he sees most of these trends as continuing well into the future.
Demographically, for instance, Alexander described how the proportion of older citizens in the U.S. was growing larger than its younger population and how this older population is seeing better health as well as greater longevity than previous older populations. For higher education, this would mean continuing to reach out to people who, up till now, we’ve identified as non-traditional students, though that designation may soon be outdated. The gap between the richest and the poorest citizens continues to widen as well, producing the greatest wealth inequality we’ve seen in the U. S. since 1914, which has an impact on new levels of debt, particularly as concerns student loans. And where growing student debt is concerned, women are disproportionately affected. He also confirmed the census data that the proportion of people of color in the U.S. will soon be greater than people traditionally identified as white.
Financially, Alexander spoke of the continued decline of state support for education, K through 12 as well as higher education, which, of course, perpetuates the debt crisis. And, as the service economy grows and education continues to morph into job training, he also foresees further declines in student enrollment in higher education. However, he indicated that colleges and universities would still most likely see more adult learners, more students with disabilities, and, with the increasing longevity of our wars, more veterans.
Physically, Alexander believes we will continue to see more audio and video, presumably in digital form, present in our curricula. More specifically, he sees the trend for open education resources growing (and meeting with more resistance from individualized education); that includes more open teaching, more open co-creation of resources, and more open access in scholarly publications. As do others, Alexander also sees the digital divide continuing to grow in the U.S., concomitant with the growing wealth gap. And, as far as the digital divide goes, he identified public and school libraries as being in the forefront of the efforts to counter this effect. Likewise, he sees libraries on the front lines of protecting our privacy in the digital era as, for example, the increasing presence of campus IoT means more data collected on individual students and more questions about who owns this data arise.
Finally, given that Alexander sees more automation in our future replacing more humans, he asks what our schools, colleges, and universities are preparing our students for. He sees an increasing digital presence, and, unless I misread him, he sees a continuing vocational dimension to higher education. He spoke with some of us afterwards and described tenure as continuing to disappear, and, as much from necessity as from anything else, contingent faculty continuing to be the more innovative presence in higher education. On a positive note, he did say that he believed these changes in higher education should also lead to more collaboration and creativity.
https://bryanalexander.org/
