The Problem
The pandemic has exposed the financial instability of most higher education institutions. University Presidents are under tremendous pressure to announce Fall campus openings for the same reasons as restaurants and other businesses. Higher education institutions need to recruit and maintain students in order remain financial sustainable. Yet the social realities of welcoming students to a safe campus presents a near impossible task.
Financial sustainability is not a new issue. It has been problematic for all but the most elite and well-known institutions for the past several decades. The rising price of higher education and its academic and fiscal consequences have led some educators to predict that as many as 1/3 of America’s colleges and universities will be closed or be merged within the next several generations of students. In addition to rising prices, enrollment is expected to diminish as the number of high school graduates decreases as the population ages. Although there is not much we can do about the demography (except perhaps by liberalizing immigration), we can make college more accessible and affordable and thereby sustainabe.
We can list variety of fiscal reasons that underly the dramatic increase in a college degree: state cutbacks for education, increases in energy costs and of course the increased price of health insurance and healthcare. To make matters worse, these price increases self-reinforce. Increased costs require many students to drop out and extend their time to graduation. On average less than 1/2 of today’s full-time undergraduates graduate in 4 years. Even more startling is that less than 2/3 graduate in 6 years. The latter increases the cost of a degree by 50%. The cost issues, of course, need to be addressed and I will do so in a subsequent article. But what I want to propose in this essay are ways we can change and improve the academic structure of higher education that are also cost saving.
Crises call on communities and instituions to do things out-of-the-box. The Covid pandemic has evoked an extradordinary effort by faculty and administrators to change from live campusses to virtual communities. I have never in my 4 decades in higher education seen universities change so quickly and smartly as I observed this past spring and summer. Curricular and course delivery changes that would take months if not years were done within weeks as campusses were forced to close. Many of these changes had been in the works for years. I propose that If we so choose we can adapt many of these innovations to meet the long standing problems of fiscal stability and meet the educational needs of the 21st century student.
Many of the pedagogies and technologies needed to do this are are not new. Our job is to invest in them so that they can be more broadly applied. The opportunity to scale these changes into the new normal is now real. This year’s prospective first year college cohort, for example, has spent at least a part of their high school senior term learning on-line and in modular formats The same is true for most university faculty and students. Administrators and IT staff have been busily adapting and increasing the virtual capbilities needed to extend cutting edge technology and pedagogy to all students.
Innovations in the academic, technological and financial aspects of education are are mutually reinforcing. The primary mission of providing high quality learning opportunites can be enhanced if we carefully apply some of the lessons we have learned from this period of crisis and change. I offer these proposals as examples.
Some Proposed Solutions
I. Mainstream online with face-to-face learning into affordable high-quality learning evironments.
The classroom/online hybrid model has been pioneered at numbers of institutions. Most institutions have now increased their capacity for high quality on-line learning in order to respond to the mid-term closing of campusses last spring. We now need to scale up the hybrid model into the new normal. Hybrid courses can be highly effective and flexible learning models with regard to faculty and student talents and needs. There are many versions of hybrids, ranging from alternating face-to-face and online teaching on a weekly basis to low residence programs where faculty meet with students once or twice a term and regularly communicate via the on-line exchange of written assignments and exams.
Hybrid courses have several benefits. First, they make class scheduling and classroom space utilization more flexible by freeing, in some cases, doubling the amount of available classroom space. Second, since many students work at least part time during their college careers, hybrid classes allow them to betterr flex their class time, study time and work time. Students can pursue online learning according to their personal schedule. Finally and not insignificantly, on-line learning prepares students for their lives and careers, where they will be required to use online communication and learning technology and to critically assess virtual sources of information.
II. Increase the flexibility of academic programs to improve graduation rates.
We have to acknowledge that many if not most students change their areas of study during their college careers. That 16-18 year olds do not know what they want to be when they grow up and what to study should come as no surprise to educators and parents. Traditional curricula assume students have 4 years to complete a particular academic majors. This often leads to extended time to graduation. We need to make room for students to explore the curriculum and change majors. This would include easing the transfer of credits between disciplines and schools and assessing prerequisites and the sequencing of courses.
We also need to acknowledge that aside from some healthcare and educational professions most careers require technical and communicative skills that can be learned via most any area of study. The myth that certain majors connect with certain jobs and careers needs to be busted. Students learn best when they are studying something that relates to their interests. We can accomodate these realities of the 21st century student, by increasing the flexibilty of academic programs and curricula through the simplificaton of academic majors, and general education and very importantly consider ‘buckets of learning” in addtion to the traditional 3 credit course. I would propose, for example, that we examine that we can better align learning goals through a flexible array of 1, 2 and 3 credit learning modules that can be stacked according to the needs of students. In my experience, as an example, I include a module on genetics in Introduction to Anthropology. This module could be designed to meet any number of majors or general education goals. Or perhaps the biology department would offer such a module that Anthropology majors could avail themselves to?
III Restructure student and faculty course load to 2-3 courses per term to allow students to immerse in their learning and more successfully complete their programs of study
European universities have long used this structure without sacrificing breadth of learning and general education. As a professor, I often found myself falling into the trap of forgetting that in addition to my “extremely essential” Anthropology class, students were taking 4 or even 5 other courses. This course load forces students to have less time for each course while requiring them to constantly shift gears from one set of material to another. Put simply, they do not have time to think. I have some experience with the European model as a lecturer in Ireland. There I could assume that students were indeed focussed on the material I presented since it was one of 2 or 3 courses that they were simultaneously taking. This also allowed for better coordination between some of the courses, such as Anthropology and Geography.
Conclusions
The pandemic has exposed weakness in the structure of higher education.This has required some rather quick adaptation in the traditional curricular, pedagogical, technological aspects of colleges and universities. Necessity being the mother of invention has drawn out the best in us, and I believe we need to build upon this foundation to transform higher education into a more effective and sustainable enterprise.