higher education experts

higher education experts

The Future of Higher Education: Insights from Leading Experts

1. Introduction to Higher Education Experts

The essays that follow take up one future possibility: the development of complex higher-ed ecosystems differentiated on the basis of valuable, valued, demonstrable outcomes. The two sharpest differences? Differentiating on quality — understood as signals — contra differentiating on the S.D.O.s (socially desirable outcomes) themselves. Chico Marx once quipped, “You can get a lot farther with a kind word and a gun than a kind word alone.” So too, the expert Powell believes in using strong signals (awards, for example) to convey the value of his graduates. As of this writing, the expert has not convulsively loosed his hold upon any mounted weaponry (or its exact replica). It is always fun to read science (depicted in Nobrow cartoons) that posits future probable worlds and universes. This science, we think, is a kind of future hindsight that galvanizes our useful present. It is the closest we will ever come to turning the tables on the seer. We hope that you enjoy (and are usefully provoked by) these essays.

The Future: Two Views

For the sixth edition of Queens’ dynamic fastback debates, two of the leading experts in the world of higher education shared their insights and perspectives about the future of higher education. First, Sam Hawgood shared his poignant and thought-provoking essay on the need for “evidence-based imagination” in a rapidly changing landscape of higher education, and Roger Martin offered his own unique vantage on competing on quality in his essay on “differentiation by degrees.” We expect that their essays will serve to prompt, prod, and challenge you, our readers, to think differently about the future direction of higher education.

Higher Education Experts

2. Trends and Challenges in Higher Education

Thus, as only a partial list of potential provocations, we present: times; data; dreams and simulations, opportunities and risks; leadership and values; shadows between the lines. It essentially distills current trends in higher education and involuted ways of operating and relating to higher education learners and institutions, and points to some future directions that this entanglement might animate or exacerbate.

Some of the most pressing challenges facing higher education, and by necessity, any forward-thinking, speculative, and prospective view, include: (A) Overcoming rising costs regarding both access to and support for life within higher education. (B) Outlasting the demands placed upon partnerships (between, for example, higher education-prepared individuals and employment, higher education and structured practitioners training, higher education institutions and funding bodies) in a climate which favors and frequently devolves into suspicion of institutionalized and organizational doings. (C) Living with profound and climacteric ambivalence of inquiries into and debates about the purposes, meaning, and value of higher education. Indeed, these challenges show up even in the infinitesimal and insidious ways we are asking to capture ‘change’ within our evaluations, statements of practice, or commitments to evidence-based practice.

Major trends currently contributing to the changing nature of higher education include: (A) The role of data-driven practices, policy, and innovation in higher education. (B) The utility of standard modeling, paradigmatic thinking, and institutional ‘visioning’ in providing strategies and acting for institutional leadership. (C) The actual, affective, and desired representation of ‘end-users’, particularly student-consumers. (D) The role of civic engagement and community dialogue in shaping or critiquing higher education practice and policy.

3. Innovations and Best Practices in Higher Education

While 2021 was a year to adjust and brace for the expected shifts, several institutions across the globe were in the emerging “other side” of innovation and strategic change. During the 15 preceding years, a number of schools made strategic shifts in how they intellectual screwed in their pedagogy and operating models, and the results are beginning to accrue enhancing the capabilities of these organizations and improving their competitive position. It is interesting to note that some innovations and best practices pointed to initiatives aimed at improving the quality of students and their educational paths, integrating new technologies and training content with the tools and professional skills that are increasingly in demand, also thanks to the reconfiguration given in organizational processes by COVID-19. Other initiatives, on the other hand, focused on the school profile, or towards SPA internationalization and in research. For the first category, it is The Impact Collaboratory Future of Work of which the results will be presented on February 4th, 2022. In the following pages, a sample of interview results is presented regarding selected innovations and best practices. Recurrent themes are highlighted across the majority of respondents and illustrative examples are offered in both case-samples and super-samples referenced in the future of work module for those in SPA classrooms and institutions.

The modern landscape of higher education is marked by dynamism and flexibility, with extensive changes made to traditional methods of teaching and learning, and administering students. During that time, a number of initiatives proved to be useful and effective, becoming new opportunities for a large number of organizations. It is noteworthy that schools focused on this change, making it an integral part of their system for organizing curricula, classes, faculty interactions, and student experience.

4. The Role of Technology in Higher Education

On the other hand, the implications of mass-scale technological advances are not universally accepted to be beneficial. Indeed, skepticism about the impact of technologies is expressed across interviews. Topics of concern include the role of technology in student learning and wellbeing, the potential for surveillance, and opportunities for plagiarizing. Such fears were exacerbated for some scholars by technological companies – notably edtech corporations – who seem to be interested primarily in profit, rather than supporting learning. Given these risks, some leaders express skepticism about their role in education. The dean of students at the University of Michigan said: “I am grave about the entry of distance learning, AI apps that purport to understand mental health, and MOOCs into the university setting, since they have the potential to disadvantage many and worsen college affordability and overall student wellbeing, although they of course have potential. I think for many they symbolize the systematization of capitalism interacting with higher-ed.”

Technology is at the epicenter of conversations about the future of higher education, with experts anticipating far-reaching implications. Several interviewees indicated that they also see technology transforming the learning experience in positive ways. In general, some participants suggested that technologies have the potential to disrupt the current higher education landscape, expanding opportunities and unlocking the potential of educational experiences. According to the director of DiPixel Digital Innovation Lab at Fluminense Federal University in Brazil, who completed the survey, “new technologies are important to delivering new ways to teach and learn and to build new opportunities. They do not replace humans in the learning process, but can help teachers and learners in this journey.”

5. Conclusion and Recommendations for the Future

1. Foster and deepen the development and discussion of possible future scenarios, scenarios that might spread danger as well as hope. 2. Identify those topics, methodologies and skill sets that, in looking in-depth or widening perspectives or developing transversal applications, are essential and thus might be helpful to tackle the dangers marked by the scenarios or to bring hope some of them can bring into practical life.

Recommendations for the Future

1. Academic identity and integrity are not fixed but contingent and caste-based as well as caring values, needs to be negotiated but can contribute to the broader transformation of societies towards a more responsible, ecologically sustainable and harmonious global community. 2. The future orientation to be ethical guardians of currently unknown yet threatening abilities of human power are deeply had a sense of. 3. Key skill in and after the pandemic and in the Digital Revolution— if not new or the only underlying transformative instrument.

Key Takeaways

We can see a convergence in the forward-looking thinking of those leading and influencing higher education and its development. Core programs, or a particular kind of student and graduate, might not be the epitome of leadership that determines how the current stewardship of the academy is conducted. There is no single, universally applicable blueprint for the future role and mission of universities and an ultimately shared view of what a university should be. Instead, we also see a future embedded in a turn to the past; we find the first hint for such a return in the early medieval university and its reinvention today.

Conclusion