How do people see the future of university education given the pandemic and virtual learning? It seems like USM has a lot of competition from SNHU, which already had a viable distance-education program in place. With soaring tuition costs, will students decide NOT to live on campuses any longer? Will the culture of learning completely change? Will there be a need for 5 English Professors if you can teach online with 2? I wonder if colleges and universities will need to re-think how much they're charging students for an education, especially if they want to fill their residence halls. USM Portland may want to consider developing more apartment-like housing to serve that local gap while giving breaks in costs by living on campus. Otherwise I see students working and taking courses online and in the evenings rather than buying into the system that's been in place for so long. If smaller colleges want to survive, they'll have to think of something.
The "4-year piece of paper for half a lifetime of debt" has already been extremely overrated for a long time because it no longer has nearly enough correspondence to job/income self-sufficiency prospects. And also because the degrees themselves offer so few clues as to a person's ability to adapt to fast-changing trends. See, for example...overreliance on MBA's who are chronically unable to think outside the box and tend to drag companies to a lowest (failure) common denominator when they're overrepresented in decision-making.
My quote-unquote day job for the last 15 years (when I'm not wasting copious time on aB on the midday or going through another work slowdown) is freelance editor for undergrad textbooks and online learning materials. So I see the leading indicators firsthand being a cog in the supply chain for finding new materials that actually resonate with today's students, since at least half the hats I wear as a Project Manager are Marketing/Sales oriented re: positioning new content for best chances that people will actually use it vs. just "editing-editing". 2-year schools are growing way faster than 4-year schools, and Technical Ed. institutions are growing way faster than conventional 2-year CC's. Very little of what I work on is catered at all to private colleges or main-campus State U.'s unless it's maintenance mode of an existing huge adoption or legacy product with bunkered-in profit margins. The commuter schools are where the growth is driving for the 4-year degrees. And this is all because the "ceremonial piece of paper you can't usefully wipe your ass with" is being pivoted away from in real-time.
And this is good simply because extremes are bad, and we just came over a 35-year period of extremes where the piece of paper devalued all other types of education. Now those other types are staging a comeback because the limitations of the piece of paper you mortgaged your life for are becoming so apparent. It's a lot easier to get a good job with an Associates Degree if it's the right kind of Associates Degree...vs. before when a 2-year education was considered trash and employers would take any 4-year generica over the 2-year specialty. Technical education is making a big, big comeback. There's more emphasis across the board in the actual study materials on "Skills" and "Objectives" to apply vs. regurgitating content. People are rediscovering apprenticed jobs in the trades...because while the job security is shakier in a recession when trade labor takes more frequent short-term hits, those jobs inevitably come back again and again without having to reinvent yourself and your body-of-training anew
n different times for a whole different profession. If things had any sort of balance these tiers would never have slipped into "inferior" status to begin with. But we had a mighty big bubble for >3 decades for 4-year degrees, and it has now thoroughly popped.
Actually, the maddening thing my publisher clients still deal with 20 years into the "digital" revolution is how much staying power the physical book still has...that you can't "online-only" everything under the sun and get the same level of engagement as the classroom, that the students prefer to have their physical book open in front of them
at the same time they're working through online homework on the 1:1 identical eBook on their screens, and that Zoom-based learning during COVID is telling us more about what's missing in the face-to-face interaction and routines/norms therein than it is informing "The Future". The cumulative Learning World™ is striving for a middle ground of balance that's most definitely not what COVID is serving up. COVID is sort of teaching some hard-knocks lessons about adapting traditions on-the-fly from rigid norms of physical settings where the teacher was master of the universe. That was already sort of happening regardless with students being ahead of the institutions on online immersion...but the place it's headed is not some nihilist "online-only" endpoint. Personally I can't ever see online-only sufficing...I've done too many review panels over the last 15 years that show the "engagement gap" when you take all live & brick-and-mortar interaction out of the process. No students--and few teachers--are ever engaged enough in that setting. Rather, you're going to see wild blending.
Maybe our future campuses don't have locusts descending in September and decamping in May. Maybe it's a constant year-round churnover. Maybe the less-interactive lectures all go online, but more hands-on lab sessions with mandatory physical attendance (or more stiffly-engaging digital interaction for those who can't physically attend) becomes the default course blend for subject areas that can handle it. Maybe the wild unregulated world of unpaid interships that increasingly serve little function but to harvest some poor sap's organs for cost savings give way to more structured lend-lease on the days instruction isn't on-campus. Maybe the whole gradation of K-12 leading up to this is training for this type of blending and (God I hope) the kids start learning this routine with community service activities on their classroom off-days to strengthen the ties that bind.
I could go on. But in my professional opinion, Education (at least as defined as some living/breathing beast of students, instructors, and institutions collectively pulling oars in some shared direction) always resists the extremes. Where the
balance lands is frustratingly undefined and a very fast-moving target, but 15 years doing this as a (poorly) compensated professional gig has taught me the truism that the answers lie in between. We may never find the idealized blend because no one has any agreement on what that is and it shape-shifts so fast, but I put zero stock in statements like "campus is O-V-E-R post-COVID", or the "future is online-only". I've watched too many people wash completely out of this industry on the boldness of their own predictions eliminating any middle ground, when all market evidence shows a vibrant across-board
striving for an effective middle ground. I think you'll get a lot closer to the truth doing wild prognostications about madcap 'blending' of learning styles than you will looking at current events in flat-world perspective and ruling things in/"The Future" or out/"Over".
