The Reimagining of Higher Education

Higher education worldwide is moving toward creative disruption on multiple fronts. As signals emerge that these disruptions are beginning to take hold, IFTF is expanding on its long history of work in education to more deeply explore the situation that higher education providers face and the frontier projects that are dramatically reimagining this area for the future. As a first step, Institute for the Future (IFTF), in partnership with Autodesk and Georgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities is moving forward with a workshop on Redesigning Education: An Innovation Leaders Exchange to explore the unprecedented disruptions and opportunities facing our higher education institutions and to design new learning environments for the future.

It is interesting to note that these disruptions closely parallel shifts in other turbulent industries in recent years, and that these other sectors have faced these issues with varying degrees of success. While the situation that higher education faces is complex, much of the challenge can be summed up fairly simply. Ultimately, higher education institutions are about to face all of the core challenges that have impacted manufacturing, banking and journalism over the last decade- and they are about to face them all at once.

The collapse of traditional manufacturing centers, for example, has become one of the core case studies for the overall impact of globalization as the last few decades have seen the widespread shift of established manufacturing centers through outsourcing and globalization to regions with lower costs. Similarly, established universities in North America and Europe have traditionally relied on international students from all over the world to contribute to their student body, only to have this traditional role threatened by a new generation of international universities offering these students alternatives that focus on both quality and price. Given time, there is even evidence that the traditional direction of education abroad could even be reversed as this trend has already begun to take hold at many international medical schools.

Similarly, the rapid accumulation of mortgage debt earlier in this decade was a sign of underlying instability in the banking sector. Today, many parallels to the accumulation of student loan debt suggest themselves, particularly in the United States. Indeed, total American student loan debt exceeded total credit card debt for the first time in 2011. Add to this the incredible inflation in tuition costs over time, and possible unintended consequences of government subsidies, and the similarities to the housing bubble become still more uncomfortable. They have also become a more frequent topic of discussion, as when finance veteran Peter Thiel drew much attention when he opined last year that “We're in a Bubble and It's Not the Internet. It's Higher Education.”

Finally, higher education institutions are vulnerable to the same forces of digital disruption that have impacted journalism and media. This trend is largely driven by the continued rapid improvement of information technologies and is similar to previous waves of digital disruption in other industries. Recently, this trend has reached breakout velocity, as pioneers like Khan Academy have inspired a raft of online education delivery systems. While many of these are likely to fail to live up to expectations, there are likely to be significant innovations from the survivors. While there are many important functions of higher education beyond information delivery, significant disruption in this area would disrupt all of these.

Importantly, these shifts bring monumental opportunities as well as challenges. For example, there is a very good chance that universal and affordable online university could become available to nearly everyone in the coming decades and new educational innovators are sure to innovate in surprising ways. Given the nature of its work, the Institute for the Future has a history of connecting with systems poised at the threshold of reinvention to help them navigate change to consciously build their future and higher education is now poised in this space.

For more information on IFTF’s ongoing work with universities and innovators exploring the transformation of higher education, contact Devin Fidler at dfidler@iftf.org.