Traditional institutions lagging as new providers enter field, offering flexibility, lower cost
MAYS LANDING — A paradigm shift in higher education, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has many institutions struggling to catch up across the nation and around the world.
Online classes, targeted instruction and expedited certificates and degrees are just part of the change from a time-based traditional education to a flexible schedule in which gaining specific knowledge is the goal.
The evolution requires meeting the demands of learners regarding time and place instead of educators setting those parameters.
That was the message of author and educator Scott Van Pelt, an expert in higher education who discussed the recently published book he co-authored with Arthur Levine, “The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future,” Friday at Atlantic Cape Community College.
The event was part of “The Future of Higher Education: A Time for Leadership” in the Walter Edge Theater on the Mays Landing campus.
The program was part of Atlantic Cape’s Faculty Development Day, which included a welcome address from Josette Katz, senior vice president of Academic Affairs, and break-out sessions before and after the keynote speech.
Katz said it marked the return of Atlantic Cape’s speaker series for the first time in about 15 years. Upcoming events have yet to be announced.
Van Pelt said higher education has been slow to react to some of the changes playing out in the wider world, such as demographic, economic and technological.
“These are forces that have been acting on so many other sectors, see in film, retail, music, newspaper industries. They are all looking a lot different than a few years ago but we haven’t seen that same transition hit higher ed yet,” Van Pelt said.
Learners are both driving the change and benefiting from it.
He said there are new competitors for students and “if higher education institutions, traditional institutions that are the bedrock of this educational system, if we want them to continue succeeding we need to be able to compete on that level in that space.”
“The idea is that we really need to be thinking proactively now, because if we don’t there are other nontraditional providers that are starting to enter the space,” Van Pelt said.
He is not predicting the extinction of the traditional four-year college experience, but did say if the institutions do not adapt to attract the New Majority they eventually will become things of the past.
“There will always be learners who learn best in person but increasingly we are seeing more demand for online learning, for self-paced learning, for shorter-term programs that are mapped onto clear career outcomes, that students can apply immediately,” Van Pelt said. “We have seen students start to pull back from that experience. It’s especially true for those who fall into the New Majority, who don’t necessarily have time for it, it’s not necessarily what they’re looking for, they have families at home and it’s hard to engage in that way,” he said. “We need to be able to serve multiple learner groups. There certainly are learner groups who want that experience and benefit from it, but we also have to be able to cater to those who if they don’t want it, don’t have to pay for it.”
Van Pelt said he and Levine have been exploring the future of higher education for nearly seven years and worked two years to write and work through the publication process.
They visited about 20 states and provinces in North America to talk about the future of higher education, which Van Pelt called “a vague, amorphous topic with no shortage of appendages.”
He said they learned the future is unfolding now and many in higher education were not aware of it and do not know how to navigate the way to get there.
Van Pelt said the shift in the way higher education is being consumed is nearly unrivaled in scope and magnitude, comparing it to the Industrial Revolution.
However, the shift to a global knowledge economy has taken place over years while the Industrial Revolution took decades, lasting from 1750 to 1840.
He said driving forces are an aging population as well as racial and ethnic changes, but said the nature of work is fundamentally changing, requiring new skills that can be obtained in smaller, more focused chunks.
The traditional model of higher education has served the world well for 100 years, existing on “piecemeal changes,” he said, but new models are emerging and putting pressure on them to evolve.
He talked about the Four New Realities the higher education industry is facing.
Ongoing proliferation of new providers
Whether you like it or not, the challenges and opportunities wrapped up in these forces, in these trends, are critically important to every single professional, faculty member, leader, policy maker and partner in higher education.
The changes that are coming will not be restricted to one part of the academic enterprise, They are going to impact every part of the higher education enterprise — those who admits students, those who counsel and support them, those responsible for teaching and learning, those who are doing work in careers and workforce development, there are implications for every part of the academic enterprise.
Traditional higher education now being challenged by nontraditional.
When Coursera started 10 years ago, it quickly became one of the most prominent platforms of educational content to emerge
A few years later they had 23 million users, last year 92 million, 17 million from United States. He said that almost equals the full-time undergraduate enrollment in U.S. today
Google is now offering certifications in an online format that are self-paced and cost $39 month for about six months. Upon completion, students have more than 150 partner employers ready to hire them.
Van Pelt said the common themes across all providers are flexibility, 24/7 access from anywhere and low cost. One major factor is they are being offered by leaders in their industries and are immediately applicable.
“The entrance of the nontraditional providers into the higher education space has only accelerated over the past several years, and based on what we are seeing, we don’t predict that it is going to slow down or go away at all or anytime soon,” Van Pelt said.
Traditional institutions across the nation have realized declining enrollment since the pandemic while at the same time nontraditional providers have been expanding their footprint.
Demand for any time, any place education
Van Pelt said they found useful parallels in television, music, newspapers and magazines, which offered individual control of content and unbundled offerings.
“We found that consumers really started gravitating toward on-demand access for services. Rather than a set time, they were looking for flexible access, rather than a fixed location, they didn’t want to go to a specific location to get that,” he said.
The concept of unbundling also applies to higher education. Today’s learners want only what they want and do not want to pay for what they don’t want, making many forgo the traditional college experience.
He said it’s the same reason why Blockbuster is out of business, newspaper readership has so drastically declined and no one buys albums.
He said higher education must consider learners and what they want because new providers are tailoring their offerings to students instead of expecting students to tailor their lives for an education
Just-in-time education
Van Pelt said higher education has operated on what he called a “just-in-case” model, in which students go to class, earn credits and a degree and then try to find a place to apply the skills.
He said that will be eclipsed by a “just-in-time” model in which students seek out opportunities to get skills they can apply immediately. Courses will be shorter term, more agile and focused on career outcomes.
“Learners are not going to be doing this one time, they will be doing it on an ongoing basis as the knowledge they need to succeed evolves over time,” Van Pelt said.
What’s driving the shift is the decreasing half-life of knowledge and role of automation. He said a Harvard study found the half-life of medical knowledge has dropped to just 73 days.
“Things are moving quickly. Knowledge is becoming out of date more quickly than ever before and by and large our current education infrastructure isn’t really designed to react in time,” Van Pelt said.
Automation is the other factor driving it. He said some estimates indicate as much as half the time spent on current job tasks could be automated away in 10 to 20 years and that the pandemic accelerated automation in some cases by as much as five years
He said future leaders must be trained to upskill and reskill people as its proliferation affects their industries.
Pivot from inputs to outcomes
Van Pelt said the way higher education approaches teaching and learning and the way it operates is based on an industrial society, one in which standardization of processes and time ruled. He said education is rooted in credit hours and semesters.
“The world this system was built for is giving way to a new one, a world that is grounded in outcomes, a global knowledge-based economy,” he said. “We are headed toward a system of education that emphasizes learning outcomes.”
About the authors
Scott Van Pelt is associate director of the Wharton Graduate Communication Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he manages the curriculum for WHCP 611: Management Communication and WHCP 612: Crisis Communication.
He also co-directs the Wharton Communication Fellows Program, which encompasses the selection, training, enrichment and ongoing engagement of 75 second-year MBA TAs each year.
According to his LinkedIn profile, he is a “forward-thinking higher education professional with experience in curriculum design, teaching, academic advising and program management.”
Arthur Levine is a scholar with New York University’s Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy, a senior fellow and president emeritus of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and president emeritus of Columbia University’s Teachers College.
By CRAIG D. SCHENCK/Sentinel staff