Learning Ecosystems

The academics on the panel, presented by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, seemed to agree that the universities of the future will have to become more entrepreneurial to meet the needs of young people with new learning styles and older people who may need continuing education throughout their life. Given this, most of the discussion among the panelists focused on how the current model of higher education should adapt.

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William Pepicello, president of the University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit education provider in the United States, argued that “the next generation of students is expecting that higher education is going to be as accessible as the rest of the world,” which, he noted, is increasingly available at students’ fingertips via commercial devices that access the Internet. He noted that the universities of tomorrow should be able to adapt to their students and not vice versa, much as Google and Yahoo can customize Web searching to personal preferences.

“Is there any reason why higher education platforms shouldn’t be able to adapt to the people, to the students who come there for help?” Pepicello asked. “And in a variety of ways, not just in consumer ways but in learning style, for instance, and in preferences of learning materials?”

James J. Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan and a member of former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education, told educators in the audience that their universities would have “to consider entirely new paradigms” to survive and stay relevant in the future. He was particularly complimentary of the adaptability of the for-profit college sector.