The days of the “bundled” university (a portfolio of real estate, sports franchise, content production, and research) are numbered for all but the most prestigious and well-endowed. How will rapid disaggregation alter higher education when learning can happen at the user’s pace, sports are fodder for fantasy leagues, content creation is a marketing process, and research shifts to the private sector? How, in other words, does the pace of change in the culture, politics, economics, and technology of the society affect higher education? How does the evolution of it and the other emergent orders in the society impact the purpose and governance of such institutions and public trust in them?
Its institutions invariably organized as corporations, higher education can be understood as an intentional order. At this time, like such related orders as the media, it is subject to increasing disruption from technology and other forces. As existing institutions evolve internally and new entities are established to take advantage of this disruption, new and different forms of higher education are emerging.
Tertiary Education: all post-secondary education except for four-year university/collegiate level institutions, which are the focus of Paideia Times and University Governance Structures
- As college becomes increasingly expensive while failing to provide paths into lucrative careers, many have argued that higher education is due for disruption. Some predicted that MOOCs would become viable, inexpensive alternatives to college, but they have, in practice, failed to garner a significant following. Do other innovations hold more promise? In The New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College, Ryan Craig describes programs that tactically build and certify the skills that employers seek. From bootcamps, to apprenticeships, to income shares, to placement programs, a number of organizations have emerged that promise to help market enrollees to future employers. Craig is a cheerleader for these programs and attempts to rally people to the cause, urging even those from high-income families to forgo college, “helping blaze the trail of faster + cheaper alternatives to college.” Though hardly dispassionate, The New U is an excellent starting point for those seeking to understand a potentially new landscape that may impact higher education by helping people find jobs requiring advanced skills in coding, analytics, health services and beyond.
K-12 Education: all elementary and secondary education in public and private schools, and through homeschooling
- Jonathan Zimmerman’s Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools is an engaging history of curricular controversies in America’s public schools from the political leanings of social studies textbooks, to challenges to school prayer and sex education.
Politics: higher education issues that impact elections and legislation and vice versa
Culture: social currents that impact what people expect from and challenge about higher education
- Bryan Alexander’s Academia Next: the futures of higher education discusses how demographic, economic, technological, and a variety of other factors will effect higher education in the coming decades. The book is equally valuable for its clear description of the current challenges and opportunities facing higher education. Alexander cleverly applies, for example, an analogy of the queen’s sacrifice—a chess strategy in which, often in desperation, a player sacrifices the queen—to universities that sacrifice their faculty to delay a bleak financial future.
- Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure warns of the devastating cultural effects of the emphasis on people’s fragility, the valorization of emotional reasoning, and the simplistic division of good and bad individuals.
University Governance Structures, a library of references focusing on the history and traditions of higher education, is the companion site of Paideia Times, an online news digest of higher education.
Photo credit: Aparajita.mehrotra / CC BY-SA
© 2021 PAIDEIA TIMES, LLC