The University of the XXI Century
James B. Appleberry
It is a daunting task to speak to you about the University of the twenty-first century. While I am not a futurist, my comments are based upon my perspective from the national level in the United States, my almost daily interaction with campuses around our nation, and my visits to campuses in other countries. These have give me some idea of the forces that are affecting us and which will cause to change the nature of what we do.
The changes before us will affect higher education in highly developed countries differently from those in developing countries. Contrasting economics, political and governmental circumstances change the expectations for higher education. Yet for many, it is the forces that affect higher education in the United States and other highly-developed, democratic societies that foretell what all of us will be facing in our respective countries.
The role of higher education has never been more crucial, nor more secure, nor-perhaps-in more turmoil. Rarely, if ever have we been faced with such challenges that test our leaderships as Presidents and Rectors. The actions we take in the next few years will set the direction and peace for perhaps a century or more.
Higher education today is undergoing-to use an earthquake term-a tectonic shift-nothing will remain the same. Forces are at work that will change the very nature of our endeavor.
These forces and the directions they take are sometimes in conflict. Which forces will ultimately dominate and set the stage for the future are yet unclear, but, we are beginning to see some patterns on the horizon. Among them: sharply defined missions; greater diversity as to institutional type; for the United States, less differentiation between the public and independent sectors; and for all of us, competition AND cooperation with internet or electronic " universities;" concurrent enrollment by students in several different and different type educational delivers; and the list goes on!
Higher education is serving a very different society than that of just a few short years ago. The forces that have shaped the change are many, and the consequences for us go far beyond our ability to even identify them all today.
The first force: Changing Expectations
Democratic principles are emerging around the world. These democratic principles require a focus on the individual and on individualism. Individual opportunity and individual responsibility are among those values which separate democratic from collective societies. It is the individual’s opportunity to succeed to the best of her or his ability that provides the foundation for democratic societies and their forms of government.
The higher education system that serves a democratic society is one that is largely independent from government intervention or control, but often very dependent on government support. In the United States, with more than 80 percent of American four-year higher education students attending public supported colleges and universities, it is apparent that our citizens have demanded that our government provide them with educational opportunity at taxpayer expense. Other countries have called this opportunity " massification" of higher education. This investment on the part of our citizens, providing access to an ever-broader range of citizens and emerging immigrant groups, has provide our nation with a very adaptive and creative workforce. It has also fueled our inventions in almost every discipline. We provide multiple entry and exit points on the education highway. Our system is available to people regardless of age. This broadly available educational system is what has given our nation its flexibility, its creativity its inventiveness, and its reputation for quality that has enable it to develop as one of the leaders in the world.
The American system of higher education also has the responsibility to give individuals the ability to be self-sustaining in an individualistic culture. We have learned that the higher the education level of the individual, the greater the participation in all forms of government, there is more volunteerism, philanthropic giving, and increased ability to make reasoned decisions about difficult questions.
This support and development of individual ability a nation resource for any nation, and is one of the links of higher education to our economic responsibilities. Democratic societies and their resulting economies are ones that are based on individual productivity and which values work. Those who do not have sufficient skill to get and keep a job cannot effectively participate in an economy so dependent on individual initiative. Thus they frequently drop out the community, and the mainstream economy. They also stop participating and become a drain on any nations’ resources. This is a waste of human potential.
It is the higher education system to which business, industry and government turn for advice, help, inventions, technology, and a host of other needs. Our public higher education system are being called upon more and more at the local level to help solve problems. We call this "public service" mission. Our regionally located colleges and universities have brought expertise of faculty within reach of almost any business or industrial site. Our urban-based campuses have tremendously increased their role in the life of the community in which they are located. K-12 schools are begging for higher education’s involvement to help them cope with intractable societal problems that impinge on the ability of young people to learn.
Because higher education is so important to any nation’s development, it cannot remain the same while the world changes. The private sector began as early as the 1970s to realize that its competitors were providing goods with higher quality, variety, and with more customization. Now they have placed that expectation on us! Business caught on early that it wasn’t so much the trick to get a new idea. The challenge was to get those ideas off the drawing boards and into the hands of the customers faster, and with individualized tailoring, than competitors. A new ballgame emerged in the private sector. They latched on to technology; established outcome measures and standards; and began to recruit workers with sufficient anatomy to use this flexible technology effectively. The private sectors change-and those same realities are upon higher education today.
The private sector looks to higher education to convince groups at local level to solve problems they can’t. we are the ones who help the private sector find technological help, locate investment capital, solve a technological adaptation problem in a company, train the workers to handle new task and to make independent judgments, and advance the frontiers of basic knowledge.
Further, higher education doesn’t have just a "utilitarian" function; it is also our responsibility in a democratic society to remain society’s critic, to remind those in leadership positions of the purpose of living; of the value of learning for learning’s sake and the contribution such a role provides to the quality of and the preservation of civilized, democratic society. In today’s global society, we are being called upon to both help business and industry adapt to a world-based competitive environment, and prepare our students to live and work in a globally-based society.
This leads me to the second force that will transform us: the changes in the financing of higher education.
In the US, the financing of the "purchase of educational services" has been changing for nearly three decades. We are rapidly moving to a higher education financing system where the balance of government support will shift from institutions to individuals, who will purchase educational services from any public or private provider they choose. The proportionate state-or government-supported funding for the basic operations of our higher educational institutions is becoming less and less each year. The consequences of this shift are enormous. Policy questions from "who access to education" to "who provides education" will be affected by who pay!
- In the US, the method of paying for the purchase of education is being re-crafted to meet the perceived need to accommodate lifelong learners and those who access education via technology. In reality, lifelong learning will require a different payment system.
- We are beginning to see that the change in the financing structure is affecting access for students who have been historically underrepresented, those on the low end of the economic spectrum, and emerging immigrant groups, data suggest that these groups are being shut our or discourage from participating in higher educational opportunities.
- Our campuses are viewed as being ineffective in our ability you prepare citizens for the "knowledge society". We are being asked to be more flexible and adaptable, and complete our educational work over a shorter period of time.
- In the continues process of " massification," policymakers want to move to a higher education delivery system that responds to the competitive marketplace they want cheap, fast, customized!
In brief words, the very nature and future of higher education is on the table for discussion!
There is a third force that will cause us to adapt, and that is the rapidly expanding base of information available to mankind and the resulting dramatic change in the role of the faculty. Access to the expanding base of information is also fueling competition in the delivery of higher education around the world. Here are some examples:
- It has said that the total humankind’s information doubles at least one time every five years, and that by the year 2000,97 percent of what humankind knows will have been discovered or invented since those of us here today were born.
- A former staff member of the United States Department of Education estimated that by the year 2020, information available to mankind will double every 73 days.
- Recently, a physician fried of mine who works at Food and Drug Administration and who is aware of gene mapping project in nearby Bethsda, MD, said to me that for physicians today, 75 percent of their medical information about the causes, treatment and cures for diseases will last no longer than 5 years!
These are just a few examples. There are more! I can’t verify the accuracy of these statements. However, you can already see enough evidence around you to know that as a result, the role of faculty has changed.
There is no way any university can teach a person all the information that person need to know by the time he or she graduates or completes any course of study. The discovery of and access to the information gives individuals no choice if they want to take up with their profession and at least be in position to help control their own future. They will required to commit themselves to a lifetime of study, learning and adaptation. And incidentally, so will our faculty.
If our faculty are the knowledge workers in the emerging knowledge-bases society of the world, then they must cope with this ever-expanding base of information.
Further, the technological capabilities of linking us to one another will change the nature of our higher education systems. This technological capabilities is making learning and retaining much easier. Consolidated library networks, automated retrievals, indexes, search programs and services-to mention but a few-have already changed our future:
- It has been reported that the fourth largest provider of for-credit courswork in the United States is the University of Phoenix- and it is the largest private university in the nation. This university is fully accredited, and offers its courses via electronic delivery supplemented by periodic group meetings. The graduates of their programs are receiving rave reviews from the employers of their graduates, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
- In march 1996, that’s two years ago, it was reported that in the United Kingdom, nearly 25 percent of the MBA degrees nationally were delivered via electronic delivery, and their employers were happy with the graduates.
The consequences of these changes are apparent. We can no longer prepare our students by using a linear-based educational system when they will experience a randomly accessed informational and educational environment many students already come to our campuses with a new way of acquiring and processing information. They play with information on their computers! They think differently about information. And they don’t tolerate faculty who are not as technologically advanced as they. At the same time, campuses are controlling students who have never turned on computers! As a result of the capability of students to use the technological hardware and software, universities and colleges have lost their monopoly as a source of information. Higher education institutions cannot be in the business of merely transmitting information any longer, either in the classroom or over distances! Increasingly, faculty will focus on teaching students how to find and process information on their own, how to make sense or give meaning to what they know! Faculty will become learning navigators, requiring that access learning styles and adapt teaching and content according.
Another consequence is also apparent. Not only have universities lost their monopoly on information, they have lost their geographic boundaries. No longer are faculty or students tied to one physical location, no matter how defined. This loss of boundaries will affect teaching methodology. The very nature of the classroom and campus-based educational experience is being rethought.
Faculty should also be aware that they have lost their monopoly on curriculum. Today, students are enrolling in as many as three or four different institutions at the same time. Many students today, and even more in the future, will determine what they want to learn, when they want to learn it, and from whom. Employers will have a great say in what employees learn, and they will validated the worth, quality and values of the learning experience their employees receive. What a change from the way it is today! Faculty roles and responsibilities will NEVER be the same. Faculty will become managers of learning, and not conveyers of information. focus on learning outcomes will determine the education experiences we craft for our students.
The changes just cited leads me to the fourth major force that will impact higher education. The relationship of faculty and institution will change. There will be more part-time faculty. There will be "outsourcing" of just "administrative work." Education will be delivered by others, and the resident, core faculty of any institution will be required to determine how externally delivered," out source" education will be counted.
In the United States, traditional governance structures are being abandoned while faculty and administration craft separate committees and task forces to get with the business of running the institution and changing at a pace that will help the institution adapt to new realities.
No longer will faculty have guaranteed "jobs for life" if tenure as we have known it in the United States remains at all, it may return to its historical purpose the protection of academic freedom and not as a job guarantee. Administration of these "recraftes" organizations will also change dramatically. We will respond to marketplace of students, or we will be left to atrophy.
The fifth force is largely unrecognized by many of our universities. A dramatic change in the work environment is underway-worldwide.
I alluded to this earlier and here is another link to our economic role. Throughout the globe the nature of the world of work is changing. These changes have destabilized both national autonomy and each individual’s sense of security.
Peter Drucker refers to our new world of work as Knowledge Society. Here are of importance of knowledge in the work life of our citizens:
- In the United States, Business Week magazine published a special report on the changing workforce. The articles reports that "no one has a job for life. Employees themselves must be continually reinvented. Nothing is guaranteed except the opportunity for self-improvement and the promise that breadth for the new work place".
- An Educational Testing service study released in February noted that job growth is booming in office work, challenging the image of an American splintering into lucrative high-tech jobs and low-skilled, low-paying service jobs. Office workers are 41 percent of the workforce and account for half of all earnings.
- Peter Drucker says that no class in history has ever risen faster than the blue-collar worker. And no class in history has ever fallen faster. The newly emerging and dominant group will be the knowledge workers.
- The head of Partnership Houston has said that students graduating from our colleges and universities today can expect to have as many as five careers in their work lifetime-four of which do not exist today. In addition, they may be expected to retrain as many as 12-15 times in their work lifetime! Given the chances that have occurred over the past 50 years, this prediction is likely accurate. Thus, they WILL have to commit themselves to a lifetime of learning.
What are the consequences of these changes? Well,
- Lifelong learning-for everyone.
- The importance of a university curriculum and teaching methodology that teach critical thinking, flexibility, adaptability.
- Lack of job security on the part of our graduates and of our faculty.
- Growth of part-time labor, requiring more than one job on the part of employees.
- Entrepreneur of "knowledge workers" that have regional, national and international impact because of their teaching expertise.
- Globally offered educational coursework and learning opportunities.
These are just a few of the exciting areas in which we are involved. The key to the changes I’ve spoken of today is in fact that we are all serving a very different society than that of just a few years ago. We are reinventing our education processes worldwide.
But, we cannot forget, however, that in the mist of all this change that it will be incumbent upon all of us in higher education in every nation to prepare our students to think, adapt, analyze, create, communicate, and access information randomly and to use the technology to enhance their own abilities, information is a start, but it is the use to which it is put that will make the difference. That has been, is and always will be the task before us.
It is the research and knowledge creation that will keep universities important to our national security and achievement.
Our opportunities are endless. Never before has higher education’s success been so important to the future of our respective nations.
Our ability to integrated vast amounts and sources of information in order to make meaning of that information is our competitive advantage. We are the ones who can define the learning outcomes. We are the ones who can develop the learning modules. We are the ones who can discover the new knowledge, free and unfettered from political influence or economic pressures for an "immediate return on the dollar". We are the ones who can help individuals to think, adapt, compete, cooperate, learn personal and organizing limits, and address the lifelong questions that improve the quality of life, no matter where one may be housed on this planet! The question is, will we?
I return to where I began. Our role in the future of each of our nation in a globally interactive society has never been more secure, nor has our future been more unclear.
Never before has the advance in the quality of living for the entire world been so readily dependent upon us and upon our success. the challenge is ours! I hope my remarks will start you thinking about a very challenging agenda that promises us an exciting if sometimes frustrating future. I think this is an exciting time to be a leader in higher education. I hope you do as well.
Last update: Agosto'98