Overpriced, outdated and no longer required by an increasing number of employers; is the baccalaureate in a death spiral?

Enrollments at American colleges and universities have been on a decade-long skid. This past year, enrollments dropped by 600,000 or 3.5%. While some of those drops may have been prompted by the pandemic, the trend is clear; fewer and fewer students are entering college.

Since the inception of the first university, the University of Al Qarawiynn, some 12 centuries ago in what is now Morrocco, followed in 1088 by the founding of the University of Bologna, institutions of higher education have held a self-important, “we know what you must learn” attitude. Colleges and universities specify and require general education studies that must be mastered without timely, regular and deep research and consultation for relevance to societal trends, employer needs, and student preferences.

One must ask if we in higher education have kept up with the rapid acceleration of social, technological, and societal changes in every one of our courses, prerequisites, general education requirements, and curricula? Are we teaching the competencies and emphases that will be required to thrive in 2025? I fear not. To keep up to date would require adjustments every single semester – updating every class and every curriculum with a visionary foresight of what will be in place in four, five or six years when incoming freshmen will commence their careers. In truth, our sluggish revision doesn’t keep up with life in this 4th industrial revolution. That would require anticipating and incorporating the accelerating changes and impact of quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and associated technologies. It would require anticipating and incorporating social shifts in working and leisure, and it would require teaching for the future rather than the past. These practices, I fear, are far out of the collective reach of our higher education leaders and faculty.

It is true that in the preceding centuries, the rate of technological and social change was somewhat more leisurely. Change from 1821 to 1822, or 1921 to 1922, was likely somewhat less frenetic than we see from 2021 to 2022.

I have sat through debates as to whether foreign language courses (not foreign culture courses) should be required of every student in a time when computer-driven automatic written and oral speech translation is readily available. I find the argument for such requirements akin to the debate some decades ago, of whether college students should be allowed to use calculators. Let me be clear that I do not suggest that such courses should not be available to students, rather that they should not be required of all students in this 21^st century.  And, I have seen course syllabi and required textbooks that have not changed in years. I have wondered whether students in those classes are being prepared for the future that they will encounter or rather that they are being prepared for the way things were five or ten years ago. 

We currently document our baccalaureate degrees with transcripts that are owned and controlled by the colleges and universities. This documentation of what has been achieved is withheld if parking tickets have not been paid or other infringements have been committed. A growing movement demands that transcripts shift to blockchain delivery controlled by the students. This holds the potential for students to assemble their own transcripts with selected courses, internships, monitored experiences, projects, and more from a variety of sources – not just one university – that can be validated by HR departments and others reviewing the transcripts. It is possible that a lifelong transcript could be supported that would include continuing and professional education throughout a career. When we go deeper beyond curricula into like these in terms of data storage and dissemination, we may be even slower towards being forward-thinking.

Employers and students are seeking shorter credentialing than the baccalaureate; in particular they are looking for alternative credentials in the form of professional and continuing and online programs that are to-the-point and immediately applicable in the workforce. A survey recently conducted by UPCEA and Evolllution reported that higher ed leaders agree. According to the survey, “seven in 10 higher education leaders (71 percent) said that “alternative credentials” could help them achieve institutional revenue and enrollment goals. Yet, just 60 percent considered credential initiatives ‘totally’ or ‘very’ aligned with their institutions’ strategic plans.”

It seems that the “clients” of higher education – both the students and the employers – recognize that the baccalaureate is too long and all too often teaches dated material rather than preparing students for the future. Shorter, just-in-time sequences of courses, could better address the emerging needs in the workforce and society as a whole. There is still room for the liberal arts in developing critical perspectives; thought processes; and essential skills and abilities. However, not all general education courses need to be required of all students just in case they might need those in the future. Instead, we should allow students more freedom to assemble stackable credentials in building their own set of learning experiences. We should expect that they will come back to the university again and again to update and upskill their knowledge and abilities. This will be the way universities will continue to be relevant and more responsive in serving students and society.

Who on your campus is leading the charge to update the curriculum; to cultivate alternative credentials; to promote revised transcripting that will turn the process over to the student as owner with the university becoming one of a whole host of participants offering documented credentials? Will your institution be left behind, charging $100,000 or more for an outdated and less-relevant baccalaureate while others will be offering less expensive, more relevant, just-in-time credentials that are valued by both employers and students?

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching & Learning blog.

We have experienced dramatic changes in the past year and a half as Covid disrupted our campuses, classes, research and services. What can we expect in the coming academic year?

Turmoil persists as we approach the opening of the fall term. With only a couple of weeks to go, we are experiencing a massive new surge in the virus due to the predominance of the far more contagious Delta variant that targets younger adults. The roller coaster ride of the past year and a half continues. 

The latest numbers show the largest enrollment declines in higher ed in a decade, with 600,000 fewer college students this past year than the year before. This trend downward is likely to continue at least one more term before stabilizing when the Covid crisis subsides for good. It turns out that the magic of the vaccines does not fully protect against infection or reinfection with the Delta variant. Looming on the horizon is a virulent Lambda variant that may further extend the epidemic and the drop in enrollments.

After a challenging spring 2020 term of remote-learning student evaluations, each succeeding term is seeing a shift in pedagogy to embrace online learning best practices with resulting better evaluations and increasing student demand. The continuing contagion crisis has helped to fuel an increase in online learning and hybrid/blended courses and degree offerings among universities that had not previously offered off-campus online programs. This has led many to predict a hybrid future for higher ed. 

Meanwhile an increasing number of employers have dropped their degree requirements, opening their doors to the non-degreed and under-degreed applicants. Concurrently, artificial intelligence has taken on more and more job roles at lower cost and higher reliability than humans. In part, this has fueled the increase in online non-degree certificate and certification programs. Competition has expanded with the growth of non-traditional providers such as LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, 2U (now with edX), and a host of others. Demand is high. The key to success seems to be to match programs with the ever-changing employer needs and to build industry networking among students to enhance placement numbers.

These trends have spawned an increase in enrollment in non-degree certificates and certification programs. Interestingly, nearly half of U.S. adults with a college degree now also hold a certificate in a non-degree education program, according to a Strada-Gallup Education Survey released in July. 

Universities are seeking ways to re-engage students who have dropped out. Colorado is leading the way in allowing universities to award Associate’s degrees to students who have dropped out, but have completed the necessary credits to otherwise qualify for the Associate’s degree. It remains to be seen if this practice will spread and will encourage students to return to the university for further learning.

Overall, it seems that many of the technologies and techniques that were stimulated by the pandemic will continue and expand in the coming months. The acceleration of technology and novel practices are here to stay. 

Along with the shift in enrollments; delivery modes; technologies; and trend toward shorter programs has come a very concerning trend among the victims of long-Covid. Significant, possibly permanent, cognitive loss is showing up among some long-Covid sufferers. As yet, these effects have been under-reported and have not hit the radar of colleges and universities. A large-scale research project hosted at the Technology Centre and Biomedical Research Centre at Imperial College London published in The Lancet uncovered a statistically significant loss of cognitive ability among some who contracted Covid (emphases below are mine):

The observed deficits varied in scale with respiratory symptom severity, related to positive biological verification of having had the virus even amongst milder cases, could not be explained by differences in age, education or other demographic and socioeconomic variables, remained in those who had no other residual symptoms and was of greater scale than common pre-existing conditions that are associated with virus susceptibility and cognitive problems.

The scale of the observed deficit was not insubstantial; the 0.47 SD global composite score reduction for the hospitalized with ventilator sub-group was greater than the average 10-year decline in global performance between the ages of 20 to 70 within this dataset. It was larger than the mean deficit of 480 people who indicated they had previously suffered a stroke (−0.24SDs) and the 998 who reported learning disabilities (−0.38SDs). For comparison, in a classic intelligence test, 0.47 SDs equates to a 7-point difference in IQ.  

Cognitive ability and mental agility are at the core of higher education. Imagine a colleague, a star scholar-researcher, down the hall from you, who experienced a bout with Covid, seems to have recovered fully, but without her top-notch mental acuity. She has lost her brilliance in mid-career. Or, what if your leading graduate students and postdocs suddenly lost their edge in creativity and problem-solving ability? Worse yet, what about those colleagues and students who are not at the peak cognitive ability of their peers? Will this push them out of the field?

In many cases, these seem to be occurring silently and without other warning. These losses likely will be hidden until discovered in deficits in performance of expected activities. Silently and seemingly without other symptoms, we in academe are confronted by compromises of the essential tool of our trade – our mental acuity.

How will we determine who has been impacted? Surely, we will not administer IQ tests to everyone we suspect has suffered a rough bout with Covid, or will we? If your colleagues or students had suffered strokes, services would be administered. In those cases, the afflicted would have a chance to improve through therapy and new work strategies. Without such a diagnosis, will those affected slowly slide out of higher education or remain underperforming in their positions without any assistance or support? Will this be a lasting scar of the pandemic in higher ed?

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching & Learning blog.