The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future

by

Arthur Levine, distinguished scholar of higher education at NYU and president emeritus of Teachers College, Columbia University and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation

Scott Van Pelt, associate director of the communications program at The Wharton School – University of Pennsylvania

Johns Hopkins University Press

 As the nation transitions from a majority white, national, analog, industrial economy to a majority nonwhite, global, digital, knowledge economy, U.S. higher education faces what authors Arthur Levine and Scott Van Pelt call “The Great Upheaval”—a seismic change in how colleges and universities operate and how students will pursue postsecondary credentials.

Higher education will be transformed in coming years in much the way that colleges and universities changed during the Industrial Revolution to meet the needs of a society that was becoming more urban, mobile, national, and technically oriented after the Civil War and the decline of agrarian America.

The transformation of institutions went through seven messy, overlapping stages that are being repeated today. First, institutions were sharply criticized by government, the public, and the media for being outdated, costly, elitist, and slow to change. Second, they responded by denying there was a problem and introducing reforms. Third was a period of experimentation and fourth we saw the development of new models of institutions. Fifth, innovations and practices spread to mainstream higher education. Sixth, higher education leaders and new organizations worked together to standardize a broad range of practices and seventh was a period of scale up and integration of new approaches.

We are in the early phases of transformation—still experimenting with new approaches that may be new models—and have a long way to go to be accepted, standardized, and integration into our higher education system. There are curricular changes in the form of competency or outcome-based education, 24/7 access to content, and upskiling and reskilling education. There are new instructional methods like online education and any time/any place delivery.  There are new credentials such as badges and certificates; new funding schema like subscription pricing and free college;  and a mushrooming number of nontraditional providers and distributers of higher education content ranging from media and high tech companies to libraries and museums.

It is too early to speak definitively of models or diffusion, the fourth and fifth stages. But candidates are emerging that could be models, including Southern New Hampshire and Western Governors University for online and competency based education; experiments in virtual community college focused on upskilling and reskilling are likely to emerge; the University of the People, which offers very, very low cost degree programs; and Coursera, which combines all of these elements and is led by Richard Levin, who as a former CEO of Yale is the only person to have been a leader in both mainstream higher education and the emerging order. MIT, a world class university at the cutting edge of research and innovation and its visionary President Rafael Reif, show strong ability to lead efforts to diffuse new ideas into mainstream higher education into the future.

Effects of the Digital Revolution

The digital technology revolution that is changing the source of production, distribution, and consumer behaviors in other industries will have a similar effect on higher education. The digital revolution will put more power in the hands of the learner and lead to anytime, anyplace, student -driven content and will shift our current model to source-agnostic, unbundled, “all-you-can-eat” (subscription-based) personalized education. These shifts can be seen in what’s happened in the music, motion picture, and newspaper industries to better understand their implications for higher education. Generally, each industry changed in much the same way. Inventors and innovators built companies and consolidated their power and their survival faced big tests from competitors and regulators. At a crucial moment they were completely transformed, largely as a result of the digital revolution of the early 21st century.

By looking at what we know about changes to demography, the economy, technology and globalization—and how higher education has responded to previous historical transformation—the authors assert that every institution will be forced to make consumer-driven changes. All institutions will need to provide more personalized content and move away from the time-bound academic accounting system of seat time, semesters, and Carnegie units to focus on outcomes that indicate what students learn. Community colleges, public four-year colleges, and nonselective private colleges, in particular, will be the primary focus of disruption and no longer look and operate the same. They will offer lower-cost, subscription model pricing; provide anytime-anyplace delivery; and offer just-in-time certification for specific competencies students master from coursework. Many of these institutions will struggle to survive, because they will compete with Fortune 100 corporations and brand-name cultural agencies that will increasingly control content development in the field. Increasingly, students will seek certification in technology from Microsoft and Google, in business from Goldman Sachs, in cosmetology from L'Oréal, and in teaching from prominent museums and libraries.

Five Major Changes

The book reveals that five new realities, none of higher education’s own making, will characterize the             coming transformation:

1. Institutional control of higher education will decrease, and the power of higher education consumers will increase. In a range of knowledge industries, the advent of the global, digital, knowledge economy multiplied the number of content providers and disseminators and gave consumers choice over the what, where, when, and how of the content they consumed. The same will be true of higher education. The digital revolution will put more power in the hands of the learner who will have greater choice about all aspects of their own education.

2. With near universal access to digital devices and the Internet, students will seek from higher education the same things they are getting from the music, movie and newspaper industries. Given the choice, consumers of the three industries chose round-the-clock over fixed-time access, consumer- rather than producer-determined content, personalized over uniform content, and low prices over high. In the emerging higher education environment, students are placing a premium on convenience—anytime, anyplace accessibility; personalized education that fits their circumstances and unbundling, only purchasing what they need or want to buy at affordable prices. For instance, during the pandemic, while college enrollments were declining, enrollment in institutions with these attributes, such as Coursera, an online learning platform, saw the number of students they serve jump. In the United States and abroad, Coursera enrollments jumped from 53 to 78 million. That 25 million student increase is more than the entire enrollment in U.S. higher education.

3. New content producers and distributors will enter the higher education marketplace, driving up institutional competition and consumer choice and driving down prices. We are already seeing a proliferation of new postsecondary institutions, organizations and programs that have abandoned key elements of mainstream higher education. These emphasize digital technologies, reject time and place-based education, create low-cost degrees, adopt competency or outcome-based education, and award nontraditional credentials. Increasingly, libraries, museums, media companies and software makers have entered the marketplace, offering content, instruction and certification. Google offers 80 certificate programs and Microsoft has 77. The American Museum of Natural History has its own graduate school, which offers a Ph.D. in comparative biology, a Master of Arts degree in teaching, and short-term online courses that teachers can use for graduate study or professional development credit. The new providers are not only more accessible and convenient, offering a combination of competency- and course-based programs, they are also cheaper and more agile than traditional colleges and universities which will lead to more contraction and closings?

4. The industrial era model of higher education focusing on time, process and teaching will be eclipsed by a knowledge economy successor rooted in outcomes and learning. In the future, higher education will focus on the outcomes we want students to achieve, what we want them to learn, not how long we want them to be taught. This is because students don’t learn at the same rate and because the explosion of new content being produced by employers, museums, software companies, banks, retailers and other organizations inside and outside higher education will be so heterogeneous that what students accomplish cannot be translated into uniform time or process measures. The one common denominator they all share is that they produce outcomes, whatever students learn as consequence of the experience.

5. The dominance of degrees and “just-in-case” education will diminish; non-degree certifications and “just-in-time” education will increase in status and value. American higher education has historically focused on degree granting programs intended to prepare their students for careers and life beyond college. This has been called “just-in-case education” because its focus is teaching students the skills and knowledge that institutions believe will be necessary for the future. In contrast, “just-in-time education” is present-oriented and more immediate, teaching students the skills and knowledge they need right now. “Just-in-time education” comes in all shapes and sizes, largely diverging from traditional academic time standards, uniform course lengths and common credit measures. The increasing need for upskilling and reskilling caused by automation, the knowledge explosion and Covid promises to tilt the balance toward more “just-in-time education, which is closely aligned with the labor market and provides certificates, micro-credentials, and badges, not degrees.

Impact on Equity and Society

These changes will affect society in big ways. More students are likely to have access to education because it will be lower cost. But lower cost does not mean higher quality or increased equity. The history of American higher education has been the story of an evolving system incorporating a growing number and diversity of students. Accommodating each new population has required changes in higher education, often carried out grudgingly and with glacial speed, in curriculum, staffing, campus culture, physical plant, finances and admissions and retention practices. Government is far more likely to take the lead in making college more affordable and growing new majority representation. However, in the aftermath of the pandemic and with the aging of the U.S. population and a continued resistance at the state level to raise revenues, health care and social security costs will balloon, producing a generational competition between two of the highest ticket items in state budgets—education and health care.

Meanwhile, as our society becomes more fragmented and divided, we have reason to worry that higher education’s transformation will further fragment us. College is likely to be an increasingly individualized experience aimed at connecting people to new uses of knowledge but not common knowledge. ”All things considered” may soon become “one thing considered,” with each person determining what they want that thing to be.

Recommendations for Higher Education

• Recognize that higher education is in the education business, not the campus, degree or credit business.

• Know that tomorrow will not be a repeat of yesterday.

• Think long term rather than principally short term.

• Shift emphasis from the current industrial era model of higher education focused on organizations and production to the digital age concerned with consumers and consumption.

• Understand that the early failure of innovation and reform initiatives does not equate to a wholesale validation of traditional models.

• Carefully monitor and learn from emerging competitors, changing consumer tastes and new technologies.

• Study and learn from the history of higher education, the social forces acting on colleges and the knowledge organizations outside of higher education.

What Policy Makers and Funders Can Do

Ensure educational equity

• Redefine educational equity from the current Industrial era definition that focuses on providing all students with access to the same educational process for the same length of time to assuring equal access to the same learning outcomes--providing students with the differential resources they require to achieve the same result.

• Expand Promise Programs, last-dollar scholarship programs that provide private funds to expand access to college with scholarships and comprehensive support.

• Expand free education from grade 12 that was set in the industrial era to grade 14 that is needed today.

• Close the digital divide for the most underrepresented populations in higher education,

• Provide all students with access to higher education and also choice among higher education providers.

Speed the transition

• Fund experimentation and the assessment of the success of the various experiments and wide distribution of the results.

• Pay special attention to common definitions of competencies or outcomes, methods to assess them, credentials to certify their mastery, and a mechanism to record the competencies mastered throughout life.

Re-examine current industrial era higher education regulations

• Develop an outcome and learning based accounting system to replace the current system.

• Reconfigure financial aid to support studies of variable length that grant microcredentials.

• Place on higher education prices in institutions do not. This should be made a condition for participating in government financial aid programs. It requires a commitment from Washington and the states to provide the student support to make that possible.

• Restore the balance between grants and loans that was present prior to the 1980s to reflect the social good to the nation.

Promote shared social bonds

• Rather than teaching students the familiar disciplines and subject matters, general education should focus on the shared human experience—linking our past with our present and future, our heritage with the realities that will confront us today and tomorrow. Consider a common curriculum focused on the common bonds that join us, perhaps focused on five subjects:

  • Communication using words, numbers, images, and digital tools;

  • Our shared heritage, institutions, activities and planet—aesthetically, scientifically and socially;

  • How to thrive in a diverse, interconnected, multicultural world;

  • How to live in a time of profound change and the essential skills it demands: creativity, critical thinking, and continuous learning; and,

  • Ethics and values: the difference between right and wrong, the distinction between truths and falsehoods, the contrast between fact and opinion, the ability to identify logical fallacies, and the capacity to make wise judgments.

Copies of The Great Upheaval are available from Amazon and Johns Hopkins University Press.