The New Arms Race in Higher Ed

??♀? How "academic?amenities" might be what differentiates colleges in the future, the big and elite universities outside the U.S., and the future of online ed. Here are excerpts from Next.?Sign up here .?

EVENTS

We’ll be closing out 2023 with two more episodes of the “Next Office Hour,” my series of webcasts named after this newsletter:?

??? Tuesday, November 28 at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT

• I’ll be joined by Jennifer B. Wallace , the New York Times bestselling author of Never Enough about how we can broaden our consideration of success and lower the temperature on the demands of getting into the “right” school. ?? Register for free .

??? Wednesday, December 6 at?2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT

• We’ll examine new signals of job preparedness and what colleges and other learning providers can do to compete in an era when an increasing number of employers have stopped requiring a four-year degree. ?? Register for free . (Support from The Charles Koch Foundation)

THE LEAD

Twenty years ago, colleges and universities were trying to one-up each other to attract the last big surge of 18-year-olds coming to campuses: they built suite-style dorms, recreation centers with climbing walls, and palatial dining halls; schools in Division I athletics leaned into sports by expanding coaching staffs to the size of the U.N. and paid football and basketball coaches like they were in the pros.

The “lazy river” became the poster child of this arms race around amenities (although there are very few lazy rivers on college campuses).

This Decade’s Lazy River

Student amenities are still important (just ask any campus tour guide), but they also get blamed for rising college prices.

In an era when ROI and value are foremost on the minds of higher ed consumers, a new arms race is emerging. This one is focused on academic innovation. The winners will be those schools that develop better approaches to teaching, learning, and credentialing.

Here are three examples of this from my travels and discussions just last week:

1?? Credentials. On Monday,?I participated in a briefing for congressional staffers on micro-credentials organized by FutureEd at Georgetown , a non-partisan think tank. There are three bills floating around Capitol Hill to allow students eligible for a Pell Grant to use it for college programs that last less than the traditional 15-week semester.

There is widespread agreement that one of these so-called “short-term Pell” bills will pass, and when one does, expect colleges to jump on the credential bandwagon to gain access to the federal dollars.?

Micro-credentials—used to describe anything that isn’t a traditional degree—are all the rage in higher ed right now, as I wrote in a recent white paper about this “new learning economy.” The nonprofit Credential Engine has said there are more than 1 million+ unique credentials offered in the U.S., more than half from non-traditional education providers, such as businesses and professional organizations. The University of Texas system is in the middle of a grand experiment to embed short-term certificates in traditional degrees. And Coursera sees micro-credentials as a major growth area as CEO Jeff Maggioncalda told me and Michael Horn on the latest Future U. episode .

2?? Teaching. On Wednesday, I was in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, where I toured its new 47,000-square-foot Center for Academic Innovation . The center is the hub for building new online programs and credentials for the university, as well as tech tools for teaching, which are then licensed to other colleges and universities. It also houses researchers who are trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. And it’s master control for Michigan’s efforts around AR/VR.

A decade ago when James DeVaney arrived at the university as the center’s founding executive director, Michigan was a pioneer in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that legitimatized online learning at selective universities. All the university has learned since, DeVaney told me, was incorporated into the design of the new center, which is housed in the original Borders bookstore (cue the analogy between higher ed and the bookstore business).

The wow factor is in on display in one of building's AR/VR studios. It features a floor and wall of LED panels with such clear resolution that you feel like you're immersed in your learning (see video below).?

3?? Learning. Finally, on Thursday, we had more than 1,100 people register for the "Next Office Hour" on using AI to design and deliver courses (view an on-demand recording here ). The interest level in the webinar reflects the widespread anxiety I’m hearing (and feeling) about AI whenever I’m with higher ed leaders these days.

Faculty need to catch up on AI—and fast. A new survey out from Tyton Partners shows that only 22% of faculty say they are using generative AI tools regularly compared with half of students who say they are.

“If you’re a conventional educator, AI is breaking the way you teach,” Andrew Maynard said during our webcast. “But if you think about why you’re teaching, what students are trying to learn, and what you’re trying to help them learn, it’s a tool that opens up possibilities.”

Maynard is a professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University who built a course about ChatGPT in ChatGPT . He explained how the conversation students are having in ChatGPT is changing their thinking.

“What we find in almost every case is that students are forced to evaluate the quality of responses, so critical reasoning kicks in," he said. "We have some students that go on to 20 or 30 exchanges, so they're becoming absorbed in their learning process.”

Bottom line: Given all the discussion about the value of a college education, if you're looking for "amenities" on campuses these days be sure to find out how faculty are engaging students (both in person and with tools like AR/VR), whether they're teaching students about using AI, and ways institutions are certifying learning with credentials that have currency in the job market.?

Where Canada leads the U.S. in higher ed

In the week when early-decision applications were due at many selective institutions, it’s important to remember one reason why these colleges remain “highly rejective” is because they choose to keep their freshman classes small.

• As Olivia Roark reports, the five top-ranked universities in the U.S. News & World Report rankings—Princeton, MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Yale—enroll about 6,400 freshmen in total each year and 32,000 undergrads in all.
• In the rest of the world, including Brazil, South Africa, and Canada, the top 5 universities have 100,000+ undergrads.

What’s happening: Applications to selective colleges have jumped during the pandemic when most of the institutions dropped their testing requirements for admissions. But institutions didn’t expand their incoming classes; they just rejected more students.

—Then two events this past summer put more pressure on selective colleges to either expand or rethink who they’re admitting.

• First was the Supreme Court decision that struck down race-conscious admissions.
• Second was the release of a report by economists showing wealthy applicants get into Ivy-plus schools at a higher rate than everyone else with the same SAT/ACT scores.

View from the north: The top-ranked universities in Canada enroll way many more undergrads than those in the U.S.

• To fill the undergraduate seats at the five top-ranked universities in Canada with students from highly ranked U.S. institutions, you would basically need the undergrad population from the top 25 national universities in the U.S. News rankings.

?—In many ways, the U.S. is more like India. The top five Indian universities on the U.S. News Best Global Universities list enroll roughly 15,000 students. The institutions in India are astoundingly small for a country of 1.4 billion people.

SUPPLEMENTS

??? What’s next for online education? ROI for online education is not just about money, but also the cost of the degree and time it takes to complete, according to Fernando Bleichmar, CEO of Academic Partnerships, an online program manager (OPM), who joined Jeff Maggioncalda, the CEO of Coursera, on the Future U. podcast to talk about how to measure the outcomes in online ed, the role of micro-credentials in growing the market, and where AI can help. (Future U.)

?? Connecting education and work. In an interview , former Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift talks about the need for equipping student with job skills as part of her new role as president of Education at Work. The non-profit partners with businesses and colleges to offer students jobs during school. But Swift doesn’t have plans to scale Education at Work; rather, she sees it creating a playbook for other organizations to follow. (Forbes)

?? Making sense of enrollment. Enrollment in higher ed continues to bounce around after the pandemic. While undergraduate enrollment rose 2.1% this fall compared to last year,?first-year enrollment fell 3.6%, nearly reversing gains colleges saw last year and amplifying concerns about how Gen Z sees the value of college. (Higher Ed Dive)

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff??

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