Looking at a cohort of borrowers from 2009, the report highlights that 50% of undergraduate debtors hadn’t repaid their loans. Across different types of loans, borrowers owed between 50% to 110% of their original loan 10 years after repayment began.
A college degree is undoing the American Dream Getting a college degree has long been heralded as a staple to the American Dream, viewed as the path to wealth that will eventually buy a house in suburbs with a white picket fence. But the Jain Institute report shows that’s no longer the case.
This report focuses on the workforce, cultural, and technological shifts for ten macro trends emerging in higher education in 2023. Across these three areas of shift, we report the major impacts and steps that institutions are taking in response to each trend. Some trends overlap with the 2022 Higher Education Trend Watch report. However, while some topics and issues remain consistent, significant shifts have occurred across many of the trends for 2023.
Right now what I would like to do is turn things upside- down and bring the physical classroom and the in-person teaching and learning into the spotlight. After almost three years of doing things differently, for better or worse, I believe this is a crucial exercise that will help us calibrate our practice moving further. Ironically, despite our expectations that students will happily rush back to campus, many of us noticed a different reality: low attendance levels and in some cases also low engagement.
So, a few questions we could start by asking ourselves are…
So the next time someone asks “why should students come to class?” let’s try to answer anything else than “because they have to”.
Educause used to be THE EdTech conference, and the LMS market news tended to deliberately coincide with the fall event – with vendors releasing news that week. The conference competition has heated up and Educause is now one among several EdTech conferences, but it does tend to remain the premier event in North American higher ed in terms of combined exhibitor booths and marketing presence.
Having seen so many LMS vendors at #Edu22 (Instructure Canvas, Google Classroom sort of, D2L Brightspace, Anthology Learn, Open LMS, Sakai, and Cypher Learning), it is worth collecting some items in one place after the conference, organized this time around market wins of significance.
From DSC: Will this become a trend within higher education (i.e., more transparent, accurate pricing)?
Why so many colleges have been resetting their tuition — from highereddive.com by Lilah Burke Colby-Sawyer College is reducing its prices by 60% so tuition more accurately reflects what students pay. Other institutions are doing the same.
Excerpt:
Starting next academic year, Colby-Sawyer College will be decreasing tuition, but it’s not just shaving a few hundred dollars off its sticker price. The college is cutting its price from $46,364 to $17,500, a drop of more than 60%.
The move, said President Susan Stuebner, is intended to make more students consider attending the private New Hampshire college.
“We really recognize the need for transparency in pricing and we’re trying to align the published price more closely with what students currently pay,” she said.
But for Stuebner at Colby-Sawyer, the choice was clear.
“The pattern of higher education being on this trajectory of high-price, high-discount has just gotten so confusing for families. We’re really doing a disservice to them,” she said. “And they’re starting to push back.”
Kim: Has higher education traveled a similar stratified road as Disney?
Are test prep courses, paid admissions counselors, legacy preferences and luxury private campus residence halls the Genie+ and Lightning Lane of higher education?https://t.co/KM8I7Xo4Nw
How can colleges better serve students with autism? — from by Laura Spitalniak Professor Sarah Howorth says her program at the University of Maine helps bridge the gap between high school and college for students with autism.
Excerpts:
In 2019, Howorth led the pilot for the University of Maine’s Step Up to College, a program meant to model how colleges can effectively support students with autism spectrum disorder.
…
There are so many myths and misunderstandings out there about what a person with autism is like. Autism is not necessarily associated with cognitive impairment. I have a 16-year-old son who is on the autism spectrum. He is also very intelligent, and he’s definitely college bound. There’s a lot of kids out there like him on the autism spectrum.
Individuals on the spectrum bring a lot to communities, whether that be university campuses, or high schools or businesses. Oftentimes, we focus on the challenges they face, but I think they have many, many more strengths than challenges.
Look at things from a Universal Design for Learning perspective. The things that you offer for students with autism on college campuses, like peer mentors, will help all students.
So what can we do to decrease the exclusion and bullying that leads to trauma? We need to create activities and spaces where autistic people can be their authentic selves and be accepted without having to mask to fit in. We need to eradicate the isolation that is so commonplace by creating supportive communities that are truly safe and inclusive.
You’ve likely been reading for the last few minutes my arguments for why AI is going to change education. You may agree with some points, disagree with others…
Only, those were not my words.
An AI has written every single word in this essay up until here.
The only thing I wrote myself was the first sentence: Artificial Intelligence is going to revolutionize education. The images too, everything was generated by AI.
Graduate and undergraduate teaching and research assistants at Washington State University voted to form a union affiliated with the United Auto Workers, they announced Thursday.
Just 20.4% of U.S. institutions account for 80% of tenured and tenure-track faculty at Ph.D.-granting universities, giving prestigious colleges disproportionate influence over the spread of ideas, academic norms and culture.
That’s according to new research published in Nature, a peer-reviewed journal. It concluded that academia “is characterized by universally extreme inequality in faculty production.”
Just over one in eight domestically trained faculty were educated at five doctoral institutions: the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford University. The same five universities trained more faculty than all non-U.S. universities combined.
Online M.B.A. students at Boston University watch live broadcasts
of professors and talk on a virtual forum.
PHOTO: CARLIN STIEHL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
From DSC, along the lines of online-based learning:
This month, the London School of Economics expanded its degree partnership with 2U to launch a series of edX microcredentials that provide learners with a flexible, stackable pathway towards pursuing a fully online undergraduate education. Wim Van der Stede, LSE’s new academic dean for extended education, graciously agreed to answer my questions about these new programs.
In that time, we’ve seen the power that online learning has to meet learners’ needs at every stage of their lives and careers.
…
The world around us is changing, rapidly, and we need to support professionals, alumni and students in refreshing and adapting their knowledge and skills, as and when they need, through evolving lives and careers. This is at the heart of LSE’s mission as a global social science hub of research and education, and plays a key role in achieving our mission to educate for impact by empowering students to develop the skills to solve society’s most pressing issues in an ever-changing world.
A side thought from DSC: Speaking of Economics, I wonder if and how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will impact the field of Economics?
This is the vision of Coursera’s three-sided platform at scale, connecting learners, educators and institutions in a global learning ecosystem designed to keep pace with our rapidly changing world.
Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda
The point of this slide is to show the diversification of Coursera’s business. Degree programs may be down, but enterprise licenses and direct-to-consumer certificates are up. But it also indicates Coursera’s ability to diversify revenue streams for its university content providers. The enterprise business provides a distribution channel between universities and employers. From what I can tell, it’s a Guild competitor, even though the two companies look very different on the surface. The consumer segment started as the MOOC business and has expanded into the “tweener” space between courses and degrees: certificates, microdegrees, whatever.
Recent times have brought about a Great Rethink that is upending previous models of management and working. Higher education is no exception. In 2023, institutional and technology leaders are ready for a new approach.
The EDUCAUSE 2023 Top 10 IT Issues help describe the foundation models that colleges and universities will develop next year and beyond, acting on what was learned in the pandemic and framed by the three building blocks of leadership, data, and work and learning.
See where things are headed in 2023 and beyond. .
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From DSC: At this point in time, I’d find your visionary, innovative, tech-savvy leaders out there — and not just for IT-related positions but for Presidents, Provosts, CFO’s, Heads of HR, and similar levels of positions (and ideally on the Boards as well.) Such people need to be at the table when strategies are hammered out.
For example, if your institution didn’t get seriously into online learning long before Covid19 hit, I’d clear house and go back to the drawing board on your leadership.
Also, data won’t save higher ed. New directions/pathways might. But I’m doubtful that new sources of data will — no matter how they are sliced and diced. That sort of thing is too much at the fringe of things — and not at the heart of what’s being offered. The marketplace will eventually dictate to higher ed which directions institutions of traditional higher education need to go in. Or perhaps I should say that this is already starting to occur.
If alternatives to institutions of traditional higher education continue to grow in acceptance and usage — and don’t involve current institutions of higher ed — those sorts of institutions may already be too late. If more corporations fully develop their own training programs, pathways, and credentials, there may be even fewer students to go around.
A final thought: Cheaper forms of online-based learning for the liberal arts may be what actually saves the liberal arts in the long run.
“Perfection is the opposite of done!” I came across this statement recently and it made me think about how perfectionism really affects one’s work and studying. Growing up, I always thought of perfectionism as a good thing, as something to aspire to. However, more recently I am questioning this thought. It adds unnecessary pressure that it difficult to live up to and sustain. I see that many issues that my students are experiencing can be traced back to perfectionism. To incredibly high goals and standards that are impossible to achieve and that makes your work not being “good enough” – when it actually is. The consequences of high perfectionism can be manifold and in today’s digest, I’d like to offer an overview of resources on perfectionism in education.
From DSC: Somewhere along the lines, I heard that if an interviewer asks you to state a negative characteristic, choose something like perfectionism — to turn something that could be a negative into a positive. And back in my earlier days, I thought that made sense.
But I have to agree with Carolina here. The older I get, the more my empathy levels would rise if someone gave me that answer today. I’m a perfectionist and I can truly say that perfectionism is a joy-robber! It can destroy a good day. It can destroy a good mood. It can destroy joy. I don’t recommend it.
