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Introduction

Skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.

—Wayne Gretsky

Today is Wednesday, which means Lucy has two classes, history and biology. She gathers up her things—phone, snack, umbrella against the likelihood of rain—and drives to campus.

Today, Modern European History isn’t very crowded, much like the rest of Lucy’s college courses, with eleven students scattered across a room built for thirty. She remembers high school classes as being more crowded, and picks out a seat. Lucy quickly reviews part of this week’s videos concerning the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) on her phone until the professor arrives.

This is the third class and second campus of the day for Arthur to teach. He cobbles together a living by adjuncting part-time at as many colleges and universities as he can, as do most of his colleagues and friends. Entering the classroom, Arthur takes a moment to organize his thoughts, recalling which course this is, and where in the semester they are at this point, plus the name of one student who left an especially thoughtful comment on his lectures. He’s used to this kind of mental orientation practice, as he conducts it every time he shifts campus and class. It’s part of being a modern academic nomad, the typical 21st century professor.

Class begins with discussion, as Lucy’s peers pick up arguments they made last week and online across multiple online venues, including messaging, discussion, and blogging services. Students and adjunct explore the events of 1815, all using various devices to reference the online discussion and resources: phones, phablets, laptops, crinkly forearm displays (flexible screens attached to their sleeves, light-based keyboards projected onto desks or arms). They identify resources that confirm their insights, or challenge their classmates.’ Students record or write their developing reflections, making them available for classmates to ponder and Arthur to assess. Most also throw digital content onto wall displays, using the classroom network to transfer documents from their own devices to the wall-mounted, floor-to-ceiling LCD screens. For her part, Lucy is a bit quiet, still thinking about the 1790s, as she’s been playing a French Revolution massively multiplayer online game for months. The Revolution fascinates her with its powerful ideas transforming the lives of leaders and everyday French people alike. Lucy plays a lawyer from Lyons, fighting hard to preserve her city from the Terror. Several of her in-game colleagues, and one adversary, have become good out-of-game friends. Lucy’s immersion in this engaging milieu has led her to a conundrum. She’s still trying to figure out how Napoleon emerged on top of the revolutionary scrum, when other leaders, like Danton, had at least as much potential to lead the French nation. Back in her class, Lucy likes combining screenshots and video clips of To the Bastille! with period music and her own reflections, sharing them with classmates, thousands of fellow players, and simply interested folks. Maybe what she decides about Bonaparte’s rapid rise to power can help her—and her classmates—understand the post-Waterloo political settlement.

After Modern European History, Lucy heads off campus to the city arboretum, where her Plants and People class takes place. There are no other students physically present, nor an instructor. Lucy has not met any of them in person. Instead, classwork consists of Lucy examining plants and their immediate environment, using her phone to ask questions and research. The previous week’s homework (data sets, audio lectures, readings) prepared her for this arboretum class. At times, Lucy hovers her phone over a certain plant so that an app can overlay information based on Lucy’s location and what the camera displays. She doesn’t pay attention to other arboretum visitors, as she is focused on her work.

Biology finishes during late afternoon, and Lucy chats with her younger brother as she drives home in the gathering dusk. Jonathan has never seen the appeal of a physical campus, preferring the openness and flexibility of wholly online learning. Lucy thinks it’s because he’s living on his own for the first time and cherishes that independence, not wanting to be constrained by someone else’s space. He disliked that about high school and resents it at work. For his part, Jonathan thinks his older sister is just showing her age, wallowing in nostalgia for the times of crowded campuses and offline school spirit.

Before hanging up, Lucy and Jonathan each renew their vow to finish school before the other, grinning, because they know full well they’ll never really stop learning in this world.

Never has there been a better time for learning. Yet, there has never been a stranger time to be teaching.

More people than ever before have access to more information. Indeed, the sheer amount of available content has driven us to invent new terminology (yottabytes!) and new professions (data curation specialist) just to cope with the bounty. Anyone who wants to learn about a topic may face vast and growing informational riches. Learners can also connect with an ever-growing number of teachers and fellow students.

Such teachers are not necessarily so fortunate. On the positive side, they too can partake of this grand banquet of learning, which allows them to more easily stay current in their fields while branching out to new ones. However, instructors face new challenges in many areas. In some countries, the traditional school-age population (roughly five to twenty-two) is dwindling, driving colleges and universities to increasing competition for fewer pupils (Taylor, 2014). New technologies present all kinds of problems for teachers, from added workload to greater complexity (and potential embarrassment) in the classroom to the possibility of online competition. In the United States, demographics, economics, and policy pressure combine to make the teaching life more difficult all too often.

Taken together, these factors mean that higher education is changing. Colleges, universities, academies, and other postsecondary education institutions are transforming into different places from the ones we once expected. They are becoming stranger institutions than the ones teachers, scholars, administrators, and legislators experienced, planned for, or hoped to enter. Visions of higher education drawn from popular culture, adults’ memories, nostalgia, or pundits are increasingly likely to be out of date, politically biased, culturally partial, simply not very useful any longer, or a combination of these.

The leap from high school to college has changed and will mutate into still more unfamiliar shapes over the next decade. High school students and their parents have more to research about college options as they examine new campus features and programs, such as learning commons, 3-D printing support and makerspaces, and mobile device policies. These students and their families will have new options for study after high school, too, including a variety of online options. Parents’ own high school experiences are gradually relegated to history, while their work and personal lives provide clues to the modern college: always-on Internet access, connections through social media, a rising amount of part-time work, collaboration with distant, unmet people. Some may feel as though the transition from secondary to postsecondary education resembles science fiction, as in Vernor Vinge’s classic 2006 novel about future high school, Rainbows End.

Revising Our Understanding of Higher Education

To be able to think seriously about higher education, we need to revise our understanding of that educational sector. We can’t do otherwise if we want to realistically plan for jobs, for further education, local economies, or the continued growth of human knowledge. To paraphrase Wayne Gretzky’s advice in the epigraph, we must strategize based on where higher education is likely to be going, not where it once was.

It’s not an easy framework to adopt, given how many factors are in flux. Part of the appeal of Gretzky’s aphorism is that it involves multiple objects sliding on ice, rather than being solidly planted on friendlier terrain, an apt metaphor for higher education’s new developments. Gearing Up for Learning Beyond K–12 approaches this slippery problem from a futures perspective. That means it draws on the forecasting field’s tools of trends analysis, horizon scanning, and scenario construction.

Some of that trend analysis stems from my work on a long-term monthly publication. Since March 2012, I’ve published Future Trends in Technology and Education (FTTE), a report tracking developments impacting higher education in more than one hundred categories. These categories include: educational contexts, such as economics, national policy, campus policies, and demographics; technology across many domains, from hardware to software to surveillance and robotics; and the many intersections of technology and education. Over the years I’ve written FTTE, certain drivers within these categories have emerged as sustained forces, drivers most likely to shape future campuses, while others have faded into unlikelihood (Alexander, 2014a). In the following chapters, we will focus on the former, our discussion honed by a critical understanding of what happened to the latter.

This book also relies on the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project. Horizon Reports are examples of the Delphi process, a method for working with experts in a field to distill their wisdom about that field’s future. Initially devised by the RAND Corporation for use by the military, the Delphi process has spread to the business world and to nonprofits (Alexander, 2009). To the best of my knowledge, Horizon is the leading research effort using Delphi for the topic of education’s future. Full disclosure: I have been on the advisory board for many Horizon Reports.

The most recent Horizon Reports for higher education reveal a sector wracked by change and uncertainty. Technological forces are clearly at play, freeing up access to open education, enabling the creation of new classroom types, and altering the ways we process information. But Horizon now notes other forces at work, specifically those from the policy world. Competing demands for increased access to postsecondary education, reduced cost, more collaboration, more institutional agility, better digital skills, and a greater emphasis on teaching combine to place enormous pressures on campus leaders and staff (Johnson, Becker, Estrada, & Freeman, 2015).

It’s important to keep in mind that division between technological change and change from other domains. Each can be very attractive and also exceedingly complex, drawing our attention to the exclusion of others. I find the futures approach with the daunting acronym of STEEP to be helpful in balancing these perspectives. STEEP stands for social, technological, economic, environmental, and political forces. It’s a kaleidoscopic approach that helps us understand the interrelated, complex, multifaceted nature of shifts in education.

Imagining the Future of Higher Education

As befits a work drawing on the futurist tradition, this book does not guarantee certain futures or specific predictions. Instead it explores the full range of possible forms higher education might take, based on our best possible knowledge of the present. Let me expand on this point in the form of several caveats.

First, it is possible that a black swan event could disrupt higher education in ways this book does not anticipate. A black swan is Nicholas Taleb’s term for very low probability, very high-impact occurrences, such as the sudden appearance of a black swan from a huge number of white birds. They are extraordinary events, are extraordinarily difficult to anticipate ahead of time. Ironically, we tend to change our sense of our own understanding afterward, back-filling to imagine we knew the event was actually quite predictable after all (Taleb, 2007). For the subject of this book, the appearance of affordable artificial intelligence reaching the level of a decent college tutor would constitute such a major disruption. If created for learning, a virtual entity, like the one depicted in the movie Her (Barnard, Farrey, & Jonze, 2013), could challenge the very structure of formal education. Another black swan would be a major terrorist attack on the United States, which leads to drastic restrictions on the Internet, on information access, the movement of populations, and public financing. All of these would alter education in sudden and deep ways. We could consider these and other extraordinary events but are limited by their low probability and by restrictions of space.

Second, Gearing Up for Learning Beyond K–12 is focused on higher education in the United States. This is partly due to limitations of space in this volume, as addressing the sheer diversity and extent of global postsecondary education would require a great deal more text. The enormous research burden required to assess global higher education at a truly international level would require a different textual apparatus as well. I hope to address this global challenge in subsequent publications.

Third, although focusing on one country’s postsecondary education system can risk excessive narrowness, the United States’ higher education ecosystem is actually very rich and diverse. It includes institutions private and public, secular and of many religious affiliations, military and Quaker, community colleges and research universities. Some institutions enroll fewer than one hundred students, while others teach tens of thousands. As we explore the many different ways higher education can evolve in the next decades, bear in mind that these changes will play out across a various, even contradictory landscape.

Fourth, this book will gradually date itself as the years advance. Observations about current events become history soon enough, and technological notes risk obsolescence even more rapidly. Placing arguments in print, even in ebook form, is a risky venture. And yet I hope this will be useful during the period it describes, 2015–2025, especially in the first few years. Gearing Up for Learning Beyond K–12 is at least a snapshot in time, a glimpse into how some of us thought about higher education in the United States during the era of President Barack Obama, onrushing climate change, the Apple Watch, Miley Cyrus, and ISIS.

Given these caveats and intentions, who is this book for? I write for everyone interested in the future of higher education. High school students picking colleges to apply to, policymakers weighing budgetary and policy demand, adult learners considering a return to university, middle school principals preparing teachers and students for the next generation, workers looking to reskill, family members seeking to help relatives succeed in the rapidly changing world of education; I hope all of you can learn from these chapters about how these places of learning develop in the future. It’s vital to remember that no matter how large these issues appear, each of you will contribute to what higher education becomes.

I deliberately resisted using jargon in this book because I want it to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. When chapters discuss technology, they do so in a nongeekish, low-acronym, gently explained way. Occasionally, Byzantine university structures and policies hit these pages under the assumption that readers are not campus administrators. Forays into economics occur without presuming readers are macro- or microeconomic gurus. The future of higher education is complex, drawing on several domains, each with its own arcana. I want to demystify that in this little book.

Gearing Up for Learning Beyond K–12 is organized chronologically. Each chapter explores colleges and universities at different points in time, starting with the present and advancing roughly into the next decade. This is a short- and medium-term future.

Chapter 1 outlines the present technological environment already at work in higher education. The details of this nearly completed revolution may surprise some readers, and show quite clearly how the 21st century classroom differs from that of the 20th. The chapter then identifies other technologies just starting to have an impact on education, analyzing their likely effects over the next few years.

Chapter 2 turns to nontechnological forces, the SEEP of STEEP after technology. These drivers will give rise to changes playing out on a longer timescale than their digital cousins, taking us across the next decade. Here we look to economics, demographics, policies, and campus strategy to see how these forces will reshape campuses.

Chapter 3 considers the possibility that higher education in the United States hit a peak in or around 2013, and has started to decline in important ways, shrinking in size and eventually cost. Alternatively, colleges and universities are around the top of a bubble cycle, with a collapse coming up fast. Either way, these arguments see decades of postsecondary education growth reversed before 2025, with enormous impact on campuses. I suggest one post-peak, post-bubble model for college, based on a university offering already existing.

Chapter 4 turns away from the storied campus of quads and residence halls to outline off-campus ways of learning at an advanced level. From hackerspaces to edupunk, informal learning to the cryptically named cMOOCs, new options are opening up for students who wish to learn without heading to a campus. Still nascent in many ways, these new academic venues will take time to build out, pushing their horizon further forward still.

Chapter 5 is a sort of coda, knitting together threads from the previous chapters then returning readers to the present. We revisit the STEEP approach to see how those forces interact and combine to influence individual decision making, then offer some additional possible futures for the contexts of higher education.

I owe a great deal to my network of friends, co-conspirators, and the occasional utter stranger who contributed insights, references, news items, and reality checks over the past few years. Much applause is due to them. In contrast, all errors of fact as well as prognostication are my own. Please contact me to crow about lapses, to offer additional information, or to share your experiences in thinking through the next decade of campus life in the United States.