From DSC: For me, I wish politicians and legislators would stay out of the way and let public and private educators make the decisions. But if any politician is about to vote on significant education-related policies, laws, etc. — I would like to suggest that society require them to either:
teach a K12-based class for at least one month or
be in the classroom for the entire day to observe — and do this for at least one month
Perhaps we would have far less standardized testing. Perhaps we would have far more joy and wonder — for the teachers as well as for the students. Perhaps lifelong learning — and the love of learning — would get the wind in its sails that it so desperately needs. .
From DSC: Along these lines of enjoyment in everyday things, could this type of thing happen more within education?
From DSC: For those seeking a doctorate in education: Here’s a potential topic for your doctoral thesis.
Homelessness is a huge issue. It’s a complex issue, with many layers, variables, and causes to it. I once heard Oprah Winfrey say that we are all one to two steps away from being homeless, and I agree with that.
But as I was passing a homeless person asking for money on the exit ramp from a local highway the other day, I wondered what place, if any, education played (or didn’t play) in people’s lives. Was/is there any common denominator or set of experiences with their education that we can look at? If so, can we use design thinking to get at some of those root issues? For examples:
Was school easy for them? Hard for them?
A source of joy for them? A source of pain for them?
Were they engaged or disengaged?
Were they able to pursue their interests and passions?
It might turn out that education had little to do with things. It could have been health issues, broken relationships, systemic issues, the loss of a job, addictions, intergenerational “chains,” or many other things.
But it’s worth someone researching this. Such studies and interviews could turn up some helpful directions and steps to take for our future.
Partnering with the private sector. Some university will have a clear strategy and adequate staff to develop strategic partnerships with key regional economic players. These would include internship/apprenticeship student opportunities and curricular initiatives including part-time teaching roles for professors of practice in rapidly changing technologies.
Looking for presidential talent in new places. Some university will vet its new president for skills and experience as leaders of complex organizations in an era of disruption, with a Ph.D. as a optional nice-to-have. There just aren’t enough good ex-provosts and deans to go around.
An educated board of trustees. Some university will provide its trustees with a realistic understanding of the highly competitive and complex world of higher education today. Nostalgia for the good old days and a roomful of well-meaning financial experts can strangle innovation at a time when the university should be the leader in solving the world’s challenges, starting with the exploding need for advanced, scalable, affordable education.
Redefining the professoriate. Some university will reject the institutional shame of relying on overworked and underpaid adjunct faculty and on graduate students who are headed for those same dead-end adjunct positions. Some university will evolve the tenure process into one that celebrates and supports faculty as innovative teachers and rewards their critical role in student career development and service to the university.
This may come as a surprise — adult learners over 25 make up nearly 40 percent of today’s U.S. undergraduate population at colleges and universities. However, these learners often find themselves treated as outliers by institutions designed for traditional students, which leads to poorer learner outcomes and, as a result, barriers to social mobility.
To ensure adult learners can meaningfully participate in your workforce education program, organizations can build on-ramps capable of accommodating all learners.
On-ramps provide employees access to high-quality academic programs, enable them to continue their educational journey toward a degree or certification by meeting them where they are, and hold a key role in paving the way for successful learner outcomes.
On average, 37% of the top 20 skills requested for the average U.S. job have changed since 2016.
Excerpt: By analyzing hundreds of millions of recent U.S. job postings, the Burning Glass Institute and the Business–Higher Education Forum (BHEF) identified four of the fastest-growing, highest-demand emerging skill sets:
Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
Cloud Computing
Product Management
Social Media
These four skill sets serve as a laboratory for understanding what business and education leaders can do to prepare workers and students for skills disruption. To illustrate how programs can help learners and workers acquire essential skills, this report includes profiles of recent innovations from the BHEF network.
The future belongs to those who seek to understand, anticipate, and harness the power of emerging skills, rather than maintain a posture of reaction/response. … The prospect of helping all those who are challenged by skill disruption hinges on the readiness of business and higher education to engage in understanding and planning for skill disruption over the long term.
From DSC: “On average, 37% of the top 20 skills requested for the average U.S. job have changed since 2016.” That’s what I’m talking about when I talk about the exponential pace of change. It’s hard to deal with. Our institutions of education are not used to this pace of change. Our legal system isn’t used to this pace of change. And there are other industries struggling to keep up.
Should the pace of change be an element of our design when we think about using Design Thinking to create a new lifelong learning ecosystem?
From DSC: “How to retain talented staff members should be high on every administrator’s 2023 agenda.” This highlight from a recent email from The Chronicle of Higher Education linked to:
How to Retain Your Best Staff Members — from chronicle.com by Meredith Davis Four tips from a former student-affairs administrator on how to improve work culture on campus.
Unfortunately, this important item wasn’t high on the agenda in the majority of the years that I was working in higher education. I often thought that folks in higher education could have learned from the corporate world in this regard. Although even the corporate world hasn’t been doing a good job these days about treating their people well. But that wasn’t the case in my experience at Baxter Healthcare, Kraft Foods, and Wells Fargo from years ago.
Perhaps we should have more people “crossing over” between the silos that we seem to have established. That is, a person could work within higher education for 2-3 years, move over to a corporate environment/government/vocational space/other, and then works a few years there before coming back to higher education in a different capacity. Perhaps more pathways and tighter collaboration could exist in this manner.
Hmmm…design thinking…there’s got to be something here…
The future looks very different in some parts of the country than in others, and will also vary among national four-year universities, regional universities like Ship, and community colleges. Grawe projects that, despite the overall demographic decline, demand for national four-year universities on the West Coast will increase by more than 7.5 percent between now and the mid-2030s. But in states like New York, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Louisiana, it will decline by 15 percent or more.
Higher ed’s eight-decade run of unbroken good fortune may be about to end.
Demand for regional four-year universities, per Grawe,will drop by at least 7.5 percent across New England, the mid-Atlantic, and Southern states other than Florida and Texas, with smaller declines in the Great Plains. Community colleges will be hit hard in most places other than Florida, which has a robust two-year system with a large Latino population.
The next generation of higher education leaders will take scarcity as a given and “return on investment” as both sales pitch and state of mind.
Nine out of 10 colleges either exclude or understate the net cost of attendance in their financial-aid offers to students, according to estimates published in a new report by the Government Accountability Office. The watchdog agency recommended that Congress consider legislation that would require institutions to provide “clear and standard information.”
The lack of clarity makes it hard for students to decide where to enroll and how much to borrow.
The report, published on Monday, paints a troubling picture of an industry that makes it difficult for consumers to understand the bottom line by presenting insufficient if not downright misleading information. Federal law does not require colleges to present financial-aid offers in a clear, consistent way to all students.
U.S. higher education faces a stable but deteriorating credit outlook in 2023, Fitch Ratings said Thursday, taking a more pessimistic view of the sector’s future than it had at the same time last year.
Operating performance at colleges and universities will be pressured by enrollment, labor and wage challenges, according to the bond ratings agency. Colleges have been able to raise tuition slightly because of inflation, but additional revenue they generate generally isn’t expected to be enough to offset rising costs.
While not all institutions can (or should be) saved, most institutional closures reflect the failure of past governing boards to face the fiscal reality of their institution — and to plan accordingly and in a timely manner. Leaders should always consider and, if necessary, pursue potential partnerships, mergers, or consolidations before a school has exhausted its financial and political capital. The inability or unwillingness of many leaders to take such action is reflected in the fact that the number of institutional closures in higher education far outweighs the number of successful mergers.
In fact, the risk of closure can be predicted. In a prior analysis several coauthors and I reported on a number of risk factors predictive of closure, noting that most schools at risk for closure are small and financially fragile, with declining enrollment and limited resources to mount significant online programs. While there are many clear signs that a school is at risk for closure, the major challenge to mounting a response seems to be the unwillingness of institutional leaders to understand, face and act on these signs.
Journalism jobs are hard to find. But it’s nice work when you can get it.
That’s the takeaway from a new report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce on the payoff of journalism programs. An analysis of federal education and labor data reveals that journalism and communication bachelor’s degrees offer moderate payoff to their graduates, but only 15% of majors end up working in the field early in their careers. Newsroom employment has declined 26% since 2008, and researchers predict it will fall 3% over the next nine years.
Addendum on 12/10/22:
A Sectorwide Approach to Higher Ed’s Future — from insidehighered.com by Sylvia M. Burwell Institutions must seek ways to differentiate themselves even as they work together to address common challenges facing all of higher education, writes Sylvia M. Burwell.
We have to think differently about the future of higher education. And rather than limit our work to what one type of institution or program can achieve, we should look across the entire higher education sector.
A sectorwide [insert DSC:system-wide] approach is needed because the economics of higher education are not going to hold.
…
To evolve our thinking on these questions, we should focus on the value proposition of higher education and market differentiation.
From DSC: I was watching a sermon the other day, and I’m always amazed when the pastor doesn’t need to read their notes (or hardly ever refers to them). And they can still do this in a much longer sermon too. Not me man.
It got me wondering about the idea of having a teleprompter on our future Augmented Reality (AR) glasses and/or on our Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. Or perhaps such functionality will be provided on our mobile devices as well (i.e., our smartphones, tablets, laptops, other) via cloud-based applications.
One could see one’s presentation, sermon, main points for the meeting, what charges are being brought against the defendant, etc. and the system would know to scroll down as you said the words (via Natural Language Processing (NLP)). If you went off script, the system would stop scrolling and you might need to scroll down manually or just begin where you left off.
For that matter, I suppose a faculty member could turn on and off a feed for an AI-based stream of content on where a topic is in the textbook. Or a CEO or University President could get prompted to refer to a particular section of the Strategic Plan. Hmmm…I don’t know…it might be too much cognitive load/overload…I’d have to try it out.
And/or perhaps this is a feature in our future videoconferencing applications.
But I just wanted to throw these ideas out there in case someone wanted to run with one or more of them.
Along these lines, see:
Tell me you’re not going to want a pair of #AR glasses ?
Soaring Travel Costs Put Lawyers Back on Zoom –– from kift.com Matthew Parsons Rising airfares and travel costs are prompting legal professionals involved in dispute resolutions to return to video conferencing.
With the cost of international air travel rising sharply, remote hearings are a practical alternative to in-person proceedings. International travel is expensive, and the virtual option means that it is no longer necessary to count travel as a “cost of doing business” when pursuing an international dispute. The widespread use of technology in global dispute resolution proceedings gives attorneys and their clients the option to participate remotely, which is a compelling cost saver for all parties.
Most debt lawsuits get decided without a fight. Michigan leaders want to change the rules. — from mlive.com by Matthew Miller Excerpt:
Most of the 1.9 million debt collection cases filed in Michigan’s district courts over the past decade or so never went to trial. Usually, the defendants don’t show up to court, and debt collectors win by default, according to data compiled by the Michigan Justice for All Commission. In most cases, the courts end up garnishing defendants’ wages, income tax returns or other assets, sometimes on the basis of complaints that include little more than the name of the creditor, an account number and the balance due.
And both debt lawsuits and garnishment are more common for people living in primarily Black neighborhoods, regardless of their income.
Members of the Commission say Michigan’s rules around debt collection lawsuits don’t do enough to protect regular people, who sometimes don’t find out they’ve been sued until they see money coming out of their paychecks.
An early participant in the Law Society of BC’s Innovation Sandbox, the Clinic offers the in-person and virtual help of 25 articling students located in 15 different BC communities —from Tofino to Cranbrook— with the support of 15 supervising lawyers, four staff and dozens of local mentors. Together, they provide fixed-fee services in a wide range of areas covering everyday legal problems.
While the future of legal innovation remains unclear, it is apparent that law schools must evolve to meet students’ technological needs. At the very least, lawyers and legal professionals must have more collaborative conversations on the broader educational need for legal technology.
Legal operations professionals have a unique opportunity to emphasize the importance of designing and implementing a business solution ecosystem to guide greater efficiency and decision-making. If data and trends tell us anything, law firms and corporate law departments must adapt to achieve better business outcomes, while law schools have to change the way they teach in our modern digital economy.
The Shrinking of Higher Ed— A Special Report from The Chronicle of Higher Education A special report on the implications of the enrollment contraction.
Excerpt:
Nearly 1.3 million students have disappeared from American colleges since the Covid-19 pandemic began. That enrollment contraction comes at a precarious moment for the sector. Inflation is driving up costs and straining budgets, stock-market volatility is putting downward pressure on endowment returns, and federal stimulus funds are running out. Why is the enrollment crunch happening now? How are colleges responding? What might turn things around? Those are the questions fueling this special report.
A Public Regional on the Edge— from chronicle.com by Eric Kelderman New Jersey City University’s plan to grow its way out of financial trouble backfired. What went wrong?
Excerpts:
NJCU’s story is a cautionary tale for similar institutions — small public regional colleges with ambitions to expand in a crowded higher-education market. While its real-estate dealings have drawn unfavorable scrutiny, the university was responding to challenges that face its peers, in northern New Jersey and around the country: increased competition for a declining number of high-school graduates.
…
Public regional universities, like NJCU, enroll about 40 percent of all college students nationally, and a far larger percentage of minority, low-income, and first-generation students than better-known flagships and top research universities do.
…
But a lack of state support, limited ability to attract students from outside the region, and sparse fund raising have made the university vulnerable to economic downturns and demographic shifts that have led to fewer high-school graduates, especially in the Northeast and upper Midwest.
KALAMAZOO, MI — Western Michigan University has 17,835 students this fall, its lowest enrollment since the 1960s.
The number is down 6% from last fall. Down 27% from a decade ago, when the fall headcount was 24,598. Down 41% from 20 years ago, when WMU’s fall count peaked at 29,732.
And thanks to a declining birthrate and a shrinking percentage of new high school graduates enrolling in college, that downward enrollment trend is likely to continue indefinitely.
Rather, “what COVID did was force our hand after years of pressure created by declining enrollment and demographic trends that suggest declines will continue for the next decade,” she said. “So while COVID brought our financial situation into sharp relief, the budget cut was a measure taken to relieve pressure created over many, many years.”
The challenges facing higher education are well understood: a demographic cliff of traditional-aged applicants, a declining proportion of full-pay families, and a growing skepticism of the value of (ever-more) expensive post-secondary degrees with resulting student consumerism. Add to this rapidly rising technological complexity, deferred maintenance on deteriorating physical assets, escalating administrative costs associated with student services and supports, and a burgeoning array of college substitutes, and the challenges are clear. The combination of lower tuition revenue and higher costs points toward an inevitable sector consolidation. And while many college administrators will readily acknowledge this point in the abstract, few will consider that it might apply to them.
A looming economic slowdown, the Great Resignation, a relentlessly expanding skills gap, and employees that would simply rather work from home. This week at Fortune’s CEO Initiative forum, a panel of company executives discussed the litany of challenges they face in developing and maintaining their workforces over the next several years.
What made him so unique? Maybe it was his humility. He didn’t claim to have all the answers. Maybe it was the trust he put in me as a new teacher on his team. When I asked him which curriculum we used, he said, “I trust you to collaborate with the team and build it. I have some resources here to help us ensure that we create a scope-and-sequence for the literacy skills our students need. But we have to create it.” Maybe it was how frequently he said “we.”
Principal Williams had to answer to the school board, to our school’s executive director and to parents, but when it came down to decision-making, everything was up for discussion. I could walk into his office for anything. I felt motivated to become more involved in the school community because he made room for me.
He was flattening the hierarchy.
Cultivating a culture where every voice matters is not the quickest solution, nor is it the easiest, but my hope is that it will have a long-lasting impact at our school. The more that we flatten the hierarchy, focus our attention on building trust and talk more with one another, the better chance we have of creating schools that teachers want to stay at and that students want to learn in.
But where in the conversation are the people implementing those tools: the teachers? And how much say do they—or should they—have in edtech decisions?
For both questions, as it turns out, it depends on who you ask.
In a survey released earlier this year, the edtech company Clever found that 85 percent of administrators say teachers are involved in choosing tools. When the company asked teachers, more than 60 percent said they were hardly ever—or never—involved in those choices.
As we started asking educators, administrators and experts about the issue as part of an investigation into how teachers inform the development of edtech products, everyone agreed: teacher voice should be part of edtech decisions.
The primary point, of course, is this: unused features in exercise technologies and educational technologies can improve neither fitness nor learning. From this perspective, one might argue:
The most important feature in educational technology products is the nudge – the feature that persuades you to actually use the features that will improve learning.
Duolingo is a great example here. On its surface, the language learning app may appear rather straightforward. But there are some pretty sophisticated things happening behind the scenes that make your language learning more effective.
