Higher education is in the middle of a crisis. After a long period of sustained growth in enrollment, colleges are now reporting a decline for the eighth year in a row. Similarly, the total number of colleges in operation has fallen for four straight years. Of the private colleges that survive, at least 25% are running budget deficits. The college premium (the bump in salary from a college degree) has stagnated. Meanwhile, public confidence in the value of a college education is at an all-time low.
What went wrong? After all, just a few years ago, enrollments were booming and new colleges emerging everywhere.
There are several explanations. First, declining birth rates mean that the pool of high school students considering college is getting smaller, and unsurprisingly, enrollment has suffered. Second, a relatively strong labor market means that fewer adults are going back to school. Third, while college is still plenty expensive, social and political pressure has dramatically slowed down the growth rate of tuition — and fewer tuition increases, coupled with reduced enrollment, have put many colleges on the path toward financial insolvency.
Increased public and philanthropic funding for higher education may alleviate some of the problems. However, instead of counting on increased funding, schools should innovate and save themselves.
Innovation must begin with the goal of maximizing the value of a college education.
One solution is to place more emphasis on team-based experiences. Team-based learning and evaluation allows schools to focus squarely on the unique opportunity they provide students — in-person interaction and engagement with peers. Another alternative is to focus on hands-on, project-based learning. In spite of considerable advances in remote learning, there is still no true replacement for a hands-on, project-based experience. These in-school, hands-on, project-based experiences can be supplemented by new and emerging educational resources, making emerging alternate higher education channels, such as apprenticeships, allies rather than threats.
Additionally, schools must loosen the structure of modern degree programs. Today’s colleges largely still operate in terms of majors, semesters, and credits. Rigid majors, and fixed-length and fixed-credit courses, do not recognize the wide diversity in what students need. Removing these barriers and marking progress purely through outcome-based assessment allows greater accommodation of the diverse needs of students, and will also arguably leave students better prepared for the job market.
There’s also value in cleanly compartmentalizing teaching and research. A tight coupling between research and teaching historically made sense, as access to robust academic knowledge was scarce. However, using the same resources today to target both teaching and research adversely impacts both.
Schools must also experiment with new, innovative business models. One model to consider is signing long-term agreements with students that make the school responsible for retraining the graduate on demand as skills needed in the job market shift, in return for a retainer or a recurring fee. Another model charges students not on entry, but upon exiting their educational program. Yet another model, for some schools, could be to target only adult learners — the pressure to reduce tuition is typically lower for such learners.
Some timely and data-driven interventions can also help. Proactively addressing potential retention issues (using selective microgrants to ease financial struggles for at-risk students, for example) and cultivation of the most effective teachers may pay dividends in the long term. After all, the most common reason for donation from alumni is some inspirational teacher who deeply impacted their life.
Our higher education system has been the fountainhead of American innovation for decades. Many university administrators are looking to government for a solution, but it’s time to use our college system’s own innovation to nurse it back to health, and stave off further decline.
Rakesh Kumar is a professor in computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
