The Future of Higher Education in Three Predictions

I made the unconventional choice to go from an MBA program to working in higher education. I did this because I believe the program I joined at the University of Houston holds a lot of the keys to what the future of higher education will look like.?After over seven years, I can now say that my instinct was right, and my job has given me a front-row seat to the future of higher ed.

My job is unique and at the intersection of some very interesting trends.

I could write at length or talk for hours about what we do at the University of Houston Center for Economic Inclusion . (And I often do–ask my wife or anyone who’s ever asked me, “what do you do?”) For now I'll only share enough background to give context on the predictions I'm making.

I am a university professor. I teach one specific business course open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students of business. In this course, the students are educated for three weeks on how to be a consultant and how to use our proprietary business plan format. Then, in the fourth week, each student is assigned three clients, all of whom are current and aspiring entrepreneurs from under-resourced Houston communities. These are people of all ages and backgrounds, with businesses in every industry. They are primarily women, people of color, recently arrived immigrants, and veterans.?

For the remaining ten weeks of class, the students and their clients attend class together and hear lectures given by guest experts who assign homework for the entrepreneurs. Those homework assignments accumulate into a business plan, and the entrepreneurs present that plan to outside funders and established entrepreneurs in the hopes they can build relationships that may become funding. The students are charged with covering the gap between what’s covered in class and what the entrepreneurs need to finish and present their business plans. How well they cover this gap determines the student's grade. Since 2016, students have coached entrepreneurs in this fashion to launch and grow over 800 small businesses in the Houston area.?

This work has exposed me to so many different trends and ideas in higher ed: experiential education, DEI, project-based learning, entreprenuership, human-centered skills, and social innovation, plus we have even spent a lot of time experimenting with online instruction and tools.

Based on my work, I have seen that big changes are coming but not the ones people think.

To lay the groundwork, here are three observations that I’ve made as part of the team running this award-winning program for the last six years.?

Pure research–the expansion of knowledge for knowledge’s sake–is one of the surest signs of civilization. It is a noble pursuit with indirect benefits that advance everyone’s interests. However, beyond deep research, colleges are not the ivory towers they used to be. People no longer need to go to college because it’s where all the best information is stored. A tremendous amount of information is categorized and searchable on the internet–people aren’t going to college because they’re stores of information anymore.?

The idea that today’s young people will be able to go to school for four years at eighteen and learn everything they need to know for the rest of their lives is unrealistic. The pace of change is beyond comprehension and is only accelerating. Gone are the days where people go to college once and never think about it again. But that doesn’t mean that people will stop going to college–they won’t. How and what people study in college will change, though.?

I also think teachers are very important. One thing that people get wrong about how technology will change learning is that they think it will turn into everyone doing self-paced courses online–that the school system will just be computer labs and Khan Academy. This is silly. Almost nobody finishes self-paced courses. Learning, like exercise, is something that can be effective for individuals, but for most of us it works better in groups. Learning is innately social and the teacher-student relationship is an important one that education reformers and entrepreneurs often overlook.

The reason I am making predictions about the future of higher education is because I think it’s a different animal than primary and secondary education–mostly because higher education is entirely opt-in. Nowhere on earth is college compulsory. College courses are not always great stand-in’s for the agora or the harkness table where everyone is a student of life intent on soaking up wisdom, but college courses on average are a far cry from the grab bag of high school courses. Learning alongside someone who wants to be there is more fun for you and it’s usually better for your life and career, because you grow together and build strong relationships.

Prediction 1: Higher education will be a lifelong pursuit, and the most impactful offerings will be interactive, cohort-based, and time-bound.

As long as they are still living, people will regularly continue to enroll in short, focused educational programs either for their career or to improve their quality of life. These will be shorter than traditional educational programs but longer than day-long courses, and will be primarily but not exclusively internet-based cohort learning programs.?

This is already happening, but not at the scale it will be. In the future, I predict that every few years people will be doing these long-form education and trainings, and that places like LinkedIn will serve primarily as repositories for credentials and portfolios built around these training programs. (Many people are excited for blockchain technology to fill this gap–such as those watching the Cardano project in Ethiopia unfold –but what exactly these credentialing systems will look like is outside the scope of this essay.)

The reason I can see this working is because this is what we already do for the entrepreneurs at SURE . We work with community partners to find current and aspiring business owners from under-resourced communities. This means anyone who now or before has been regularly skipped over when it comes to financial or educational resources, or the informal social networks so helpful in starting a business. The average age of the entrepreneurs who come to campus every week is 41 years old. We “sell” a free entrepreneurship program, but we are also teaching financial literacy and job skills.?

Part of SURE’s success at upskilling people has been due to the emphasis on economic justice. The demand is obvious because many SURE entrepreneurs belong to populations that have historically been shut out of various educational or financial opportunities. However, in the future, as technology continues to develop and the structure of our economy and the jobs in it change, everyone will eventually need this kind of occasional upskilling. There are already huge companies like Coursera and startups like Maven trying to fill this gap, but in the future, I think colleges and universities will take a much more proactive role.?

The SURE Entrepreneurs are learning a ton, but it is most impactful because it is cohort-based and time-bound. In the program, the SURE Entrepreneurs meet like-minded people and they grow closer through tackling similar challenges together or independently alongside one another. Interaction is built into each lesson. Most of the entrepreneurs say that the biggest takeaway for them is the network of other entrepreneurs they met through the course. This is one reason it works better than self-paced learning.?

Personally, I know that cohort-based time-bound courses yield better results than self-paced courses because I am something of an addict when it comes to online courses. Between Coursera, Udemy, Teachable, email sequences, pdfs, etc., I have signed up for and started hundreds of online courses and professional trainings. Far and away, the most impactful were the Write of Passage , the Stanford Design School Teaching and Learning Studio , and Building a Second Brain . Why? Because I joined a community when I went through these courses.?

Prediction 2: College will remain popular for young people, but what and how they study will change.?

Learning subjects and disciplines will still be important but much of the focus will shift to students building relationships, understanding themselves, and developing the meta-skills needed to pursue lifelong learning. The foundational educational lessons students need (reading, writing, arithmetic etc.) will still be learned in secondary school and earlier. Higher education will not become completely devoid of subject-area study, but it will be much more about the context, the relationship-building, and each student learning about their own self-efficacy. People will continue to go to college because there are no competitors trying to offer this specific blend of things now.?

Unlike the various places competing to upskill adults, there are not that many places trying to offer a competitive place for young people to learn about themselves in the same way they would in a traditional college or university setting. There are some outward-bound programs and some outliers like a Thiel Fellowship, and there are those who would contend that someone learns more about themselves from a job than from college, but there’s not an institutional alternative to the self-knowledge one develops at college. College students in the future will learn about themselves and how they learn first, then get reps in putting this knowledge into practice through courses in specific domains.?

This is what we do for the university students enrolled in SURE. As opposed to many “hands-on” courses (where students are working with a large corporation or nonprofit manipulating a sterile dataset or designing a fake marketing campaign that will never be used), in SURE, students work with actual, boots-on-the-ground people who want to start or grow small businesses.?

Many who hear that we make students consultants are curious about what a college student acting as a consultant can offer a working entrepreneur. We reply that students can navigate government bureaucracy, authenticate information on the internet, prepare professional documents, solicit mentorship, and demonstrate technical acumen–all before even considering their domain expertise in their major. Many students don’t even know that they have acquired these skills before they are tasked with putting them to use for someone else.?

Before they are even assigned their entrepreneur clients, the students are surveyed and asked questions like:?

• What are your strengths and how do you put them to work?
• What are your weaknesses and how are you working on them??
• What is something not a lot of people know about you that you are proud of??
• What is something people need to know to work well with you??

Then, over the course of the semester, we have them revisit their initial answers. This kind of introspection is a microcosm of what college will be like in the future.?Students will not so much think about college as, “did I learn enough about accounting to make sure I will be a good accountant,” but “did I learn enough about myself to make sure I will be a good accountant?”?

Prediction 3: We will see the rise of superstar educators and “layered” education.?

In 2021, Masterclass more than tripled in size to nearly 3 Billion dollars. If you’re not familiar, Masterclass is an online platform where people take self-paced courses from celebrity educators like Alicia Keys, Gordon Ramsey, Samuel L. Jackson, Neil Degrasse Tyson, and Natalie Portman.

Masterclass is not the only company trying to leverage the ascent of master teachers and celebrity teachers. One of my favorite people who frequently talks about this is Scott Galloway, who has based one of his companies, Section 4, around this idea. Outlier is a company that finds the best teacher in the nation for core courses and then gives people college credit for that course. There are also a lot of cool stories out of China about how the internet has turned great teachers into celebrities.?

Contrary to the idea that soon the best teachers will be able to reach legions of students, one of my favorite online writers Erik Hoel has a great article called Why we stopped making Einsteins where he loosely postulates that the reason we have fewer “geniuses” is that we have less aristocratic tutoring–or one on one tutors working with pupils. Other people have tried to counter argue his point, but I think it is at least partially true. In order to raise the next generation of Einsteins, I think we will also see a rise in one-on-one tutors for the very best students. So how do I reconcile the increase of celebrity teachers with the increase in one-on-one tutors??

They can both happen at the same time with something we at SURE call layered education. You can already see it in place in other scenarios. I train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ). In BJJ, there are five belts for skill level: white, blue, purple, brown, black. The progression is pretty big–there’s not a puncher’s chance in BJJ. Meaning, a white will never, ever beat a black. However, oftentimes the beginners’ classes are taught by purple belts, not black belts. This is because at the level of abstraction the white belts needs, the purple belts can effectively answer any question that they may have–especially because it’s understood that the purple belts are supplementing the black belts’ instruction, not replacing it.?

We practice something similar in SURE. Any question the consultant has, they take it to their Senior Consultant. A Senior Consultant took the course in a previous semester and did an excellent job, so we hired them back as an adjunct instructor. Once hired back, they work alongside myself and the other two professors who run the program. Specifically, each Senior Consultant supervises 5-10 student consultants directly.

Something like 90% of the student consultants’ questions will be something that a Senior Consultant had to deal with before, or will be a question already answered explicitly in the syllabus. The Senior Consultants are empowered to answer these questions without my supervision. Answering these 90% of questions keeps them out of my and the other professors' inboxes. The end result is that the students and entrepreneurs get all their needs met more quickly and consistently, I have a lot more time for the more in-depth and sophisticated issues students or consultants may have, and the Senior Consultants gain valuable teaching and management experience.

All three of the best online courses I talked about before have a similar structure to SURE, where they have recent alumni return in a paid or volunteer role and do some level of entry-level teaching or troubleshooting. Then, when you have a great question or project and the alumni feels you’ve ventured out of their wheelhouse, you get the opportunity to interface with the main teachers.?

Many universities and coding bootcamps also do this. And frankly this is why PhD students teach entry level course in university. The difference is that these kinds of roles will become clearer and more prestigious, whereas now they are mostly done on an ad-hoc basis. For every “black belt,” who leads a course, there will be “purple belts” who have high but-not-as-high status within that community. Developing a sophisticated means of training and raising up these purple belts will be how the black belts will be able to both educate the masses and also devote time to one-on-one scholarly tutoring.?

The Next Six Years and Beyond

These are not just intellectual postures, but ideas I have staked my career on. Within the University of Houston, across other universities, and in the private sector, I’m part of several initiatives to build and cultivate communities built around making these three predictions come true. I am currently working with Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship (WCE) to develop one of their online cohort-based offerings, and we have applied all of these lessons to SURE several tiems over.

I am grateful that I’ve been part of the team that has built SURE and that I’ve been able to get a front row to the future of higher education the way I have. If you’re an educator or someone who thinks about how the world is moving onto the internet, I would love to know your thoughts.

If you find this kind of thing interesting, drop a comment and let me know what you think. I'd love to hear your thoughts and engage on the future of higher education and the importance of small businesses.