Is the Decade Ahead One of Risks or Opportunities for Higher Education?

Higher education stands at a crossroads right now with forces largely out of their control—financial, demographic, political, and technological— that promise to bring substantial changes to the industry in the decade ahead, according to a new report released last week.

The report, Beyond the Horizon: What’s Next for Higher Education, outlines the challenges and opportunities for colleges and universities in areas critical to their future from enrollment and internationalization to technology and state and federal funding. Among the key findings of the report:

Migration patterns of students are shifting.

Demographics are destiny for colleges and universities. Tracking high-school graduation rates are fine, but not every high-school graduate goes on to college. What’s more, despite how much colleges and universities tout the geographic diversity of their campuses, higher education is still largely a local market: about half of students who attend four-year colleges do so within 100 miles of their home.

A new analysis of college-going data shows that the historical hot spots of students, regions like the Northeast and Midwest, as well as even specific cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, will post dramatic losses in college-going students between now and 2030 of 15% or more.

Overall, the analysis from Nathan Grawe, an economist at Carleton College, estimates that four-year colleges nationwide stand to lose almost 280,000 students in just one four-year period at the end of the 2020s.

Not all schools will be affected equally. Elite colleges—those in the top 50 of the U.S. News & World Report national rankings—will have about half the drop-off in student demand as those outside the top 100 because household brand names attract students willing to travel far.

The era of international studies flooding the U.S. market is over.

The number of new international students fell in the last academic year. As educational options improve in their own countries, some students are choosing to attend college closer to home, while a pack of aggressive new entrants into the international- student market—places like Canada and Ireland—seek to lure away those who might have once gone to the United States. The demographic wave in China, source of one out of every three foreign students, has crested, while Saudi Arabia and Brazil are ending generous government scholarship programs.

Does that mean the U.S. will lose its position as the top destination in the world for international students? Not likely. The United States enrolls double the number of foreign students than its nearest rival, Britain. Instead, the better question might be this: Going forward, will only a select group of colleges be positioned to compete for students from overseas?

Already, signs point to a divergence. About half of colleges taking part in a survey by the Institute of International Education and nine other higher-education associations found new international enrollments decreased in fall 2017, but a quarter reported no change from the previous year and another 30% actually had enrollment gains. Colleges in Texas and the Midwest saw double-digit declines, but in New England, there was a small bump up. More selective colleges, those that accept less than 25% of applicants, fared well while associate- and master’s-degree institutions took an enrollment hit.

The next wave of technology will focus on student success.

Campuses have spent years transforming their operations to collect the digital breadcrumbs their students leave behind in online course-management systems, keycard systems, and financial and registration systems.

But until recently all that data was rarely used across campuses to figure out why some students succeed, and others don’t. That could change over the next decade or so, as colleges work to connect the dots, by creating data warehouses that draw on activity across systems, sometimes in real time. And institutions are putting the data into the hands of administrators charged with student success, giving professors a richer picture of the students sitting in their classrooms and, in some cases, letting students get answers to their questions in new ways.

What makes this round of technology different is artificial-intelligence algorithms, which can bring raw numbers into focus in new ways through visualizations and can detect patterns fast enough to make meaningful interventions. At Georgia State University, for example, a software robot even gives out scholarships when it notices that students are both high-achieving and at risk of being kicked out for not paying a relatively small tuition bill.

Much has been written about advising systems that can recommend courses the way Netflix points popcorn-eating watchers to new movies, but it turns out that may be just the beginning. Once connected, all those scattered dots can form a rich paint-by-number of each student, a portrait colleges hope will increase retention and deliver clear ROI on the tech investment.

Public universities will become even more like privates.

The amount that states spend on higher education hasn’t budged much since 1980, despite inflation and enrollment increases. As a result, the share of state support as a percentage of overall college budgets has dwindled, with students and families paying the majority of the cost of education in half the states. The Pell Institute for Study of Opportunity in Higher Education estimates that, at current rates, state spending on public colleges will zero out by 2056.

Despite these negative trends, with few exceptions, the downward trajectory of state spending on higher education in the past did not stem from out-and-out opposition to college. More often, higher education was an incidental victim. It was less about legislators wishing to cause harm to higher education and more about their favoring other areas.

What is new, though, is a shift in attitude among lawmakers and a percentage of the general public toward higher education itself. This development is not good for colleges. In a recent Pew Research Center study, six in 10 Republican or Republican-leaning voters said they had a negative view of higher education, a sharply pessimistic turn in perceptions.

The previous period of disinvestment might be described as an era of neglect. But the relationship between colleges and Republican-leaning lawmakers and voters has soured. Will colleges be able to adjust to a new normal that is increasingly unfriendly, maybe even hostile, to higher education?

In many ways this current period of upheaval in higher education is similar to the time in higher education in the decades right before the American Civil War, when the economy was transformed by the Industrial Revolution. That period was punctuated by a development that still stands as one of the greatest innovations in American higher education: the signing of the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862. That law set the stage for mass education in the U.S., the expansion of the research apparatus of the modern university, and the introduction of dozens of new academic disciplines.

A similar approach is needed now to create a vision for what higher education should be in the 21st-century global economy. Rather than view this decade ahead as one of great risk, despair, and retrenchment, we should view it as a moment of great opportunity, optimism, and growth.

Jeffrey Selingo is author of There Is Life After College: What Parents and Students Should Know About Navigating School to Prepare for the Jobs of Tomorrow. You can follow his writing here, on Twitter @jselingo, on Facebook, and sign up for free newsletters about the future of higher education at jeffselingo.com.

He is a regular contributor to the Washington Post’s Grade Point blog, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and a visiting scholar at Georgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities.