<p>Where do you think we're headed in the next 20-50+ years? How will the landscape change? Any positive/negative trends that you believe will happen in the academy across all echelons?</p>
<p>My views:</p>
<p>-State flagships will rise in appeal, especially ones with a large engineering contingent or ones willing to keep tuition costs low.</p>
<p>-Privates that aren't as good with financial aid will take some major hits as applicants become more price-aware.</p>
<p>-Colleges with programs towards resource distribution and water are going to become more important as droughts become more prevalent.</p>
<p>-Speaking of droughts, Southern California schools may take a serious hit depending on climate change. Who wants to go to school where water is being rationed?</p>
<p>-Studying out of the country will rise in popularity as more people learn about the comparative quality and lower price of many Canadian and Australian institutions.</p>
<p>-Liberal Arts PhD numbers will begin to decline as people realize the oversupply in the field. Intriguingly, this may mean that in 40 years we may suffer from a relative shortage.</p>
<p>I'm less sure on what the future is on a college-to-college level, save for Gordon Gee continuing to be his controversial self.</p>
<p>First 2 years by MOOCs and/or local branch/CC before transferring to the main campus will be a major mode of educational delivery (the current PSU system but with MOOCs added on).</p>
<p>Many LACs will die. A lot of the rest will specialize as pre-professional institutes. The very elite LACs (maybe all elites) will be considered luxury goods. </p>
<p>I actually see fin aid decreasing even more with the privates outside the elite tier switching to a “full-pay or merit scholarship or MOOC” model.</p>
<p>Climate change will definitely have an effect, but those schools near sea level in the path of hurricanes will be affected more. They manage to keep Phoenix and LV supplied with water in the middle of the freakin’ desert, after all, though a lot of the Sun Belt (not just SoCal; TX will experience many more droughts as well) will be affected by climate chan</p>
<p>Do not be surprised if several/many of the elites absolutely explode in size using MOOCs. Then we’ll have the same stupid debates about whether a MOOC Ivy is really a “true Ivy” akin to the current mudslinging that goes on whenever insecure/immature people slag Cornell’s contract colleges or Columbia GS (or Emory’s Oxford College, as an example outside the Ivy League).</p>
<p>The reason I single out Socal is because it has the most well-known colleges. The drought that I’ve heard predicted to cause water rationing in LA would first cause rationing in the more desert-y southwest, I’m sure.</p>
<p>MOOCs certainly seem to be popular, but I’m not sure that the elites (with the possible exception of Cornell, as they have a more populist mission than their more elitist fellows) would be willing to “dilute” their product (and thus anger their donors). Exclusivity is prized, after all.</p>
<p>I agree with y’ll both. Especially the climate change part and when you mentioned how ppl would lave collleges that r less generous with financial aid.</p>
<p>First, the pricing bubble will burst. Many radical changes will follow over 20-50 years.</p>
<p>At the most prestigious 50-75 schools, the high price / high aid model will revert to a more traditional model (flat-rate pricing for all but a relatively few scholarship students.) Middle income Americans will be priced out of these schools almost completely. Rich international students will take up the slack. Some of these 50-75, and many other private schools (including most liberal arts colleges), will fail or become radically transformed. Some will be absorbed into state university systems (as New College of Florida was). China and India will acquire several others. Affirmative action will be completely abandoned. Standardized tests will become more important and more challenging. Tests will filter out all but the very most gifted (and indirectly, all but the most affluent) from admission to these schools. </p>
<p>Most liberal arts majors will disappear at public institutions, which will become high-class trade schools for 99% of college-bound Americans. Medical education will begin at the undergraduate level. Co-op and “work college” models will become more common. 3 year undergraduate programs, or 3+2 undergraduate plus professional training programs, will become more common. New financing & taxation schemes will be invented (maybe something like Obamacare for higher ed, which will require all employed Americans to be covered by a higher education 529-like financing plan). </p>
<p>We’ll cease to have “national” universities and colleges as we now know them. We’ll have state/regional trade schools and “world” universities. The latter will be concentrated in California and New England or even abroad. Some failed state and private schools (especially in the South and Midwest) will become “world” research institutes for graduate students and researchers only (especially in STEM fields like oceanography, earth and atmospheric sciences, mining/metallurgy). More departments and divisions will be named after wealthy donors (as many business schools/programs already are). </p>
<p>We’ll see more military and other kinds of “service” academies. These will address the need not only for military officer training but also for diplomatic service and “peace engineering”. More free educations will be provided in exchange for commitments to serve as engineers, health care workers, teachers, etc., in US/NATO-occupied countries of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Their departments and divisions will be named after near-contemporary world-historic personalities (for example, the “Rafic Hariri School of Middle East Peace and Prosperity Studies”, nicknamed the “RaHa School”).</p>
<p>The California CC->UC/CSU route is probably a better model, since it is much less expensive to the student. The PSU branch campuses appear to be mostly like CCs that cost as much as four year schools. At $518 per credit for PA residents, their tuition is greater than that of the California CCs’ tuition of $46 per credit in-state and $259 per credit out-of-state.</p>
<p>Price discrimination (charging each buyer (student) a different price) benefits the sellers (colleges), so it is in the colleges’ interests to continue to set high list prices but offer individual discounts (scholarships and financial aid) depending on what they believe a student is willing to pay.</p>
<p>@GMTplus7: @kaarboer:
Yes, but the prestige-crazed won’t be as numerous and thus won’t go so much down the totem pole. As for exclusivity, some of them elites may keep that just purely with admissions, but expect changes. For example, if a university takes in 4 times as many students as now with the first 2 years spent learning through cheap (to deliver as well as tuition cost) MOOCs, and allow only the best quarter to continue on to be upperclassmen on the main campus (with the rest transfering to state schools that there are articulation agreements with), the university would be just as exclusive and tuition costs would be nearly halved. Actually, in this case, the university would probably work it out where half the campus begins on the main campus and half start with MOOCs (so 2/3rds the upperclassmen).
BTW, I think there is some leeway in terms of how many students universities can accept while remaining exclusive. For example, the U of Chicago has almost doubled its undergraduate size while dropping admit rates sharply and going up the rankings over the past 3 decades.
Do expect school sizes to change. Note that Amherst was once the 4th largest college in the US.
You folks should read Peter Turchin. We’re close to the end of a long secular cycle of intra-elite competition that will come to a head in the 2020’s. I expect the the US in the 2030’s to be unimaginably different from what it is today.</p>
<p>Intra-elite competition and widening inequality leading to more people trying for the elite schools, meaning they can raise list prices at a rate far above wage inflation.</p>
<p>In a world where that is not true, a lot will be different.</p>
<p>The main question with this model is that many otherwise college-ready students do not have the self-motivation to keep up with self-paced courses, which are relatively uncommon even at more selective universities.</p>
<p>Your climate change impact/projections appear grossly exaggerate to me. It sounds like fearmongering/rhetoric from the leftist partisan political machine (akin to peak oil and lumping all GMOs into one, big category).</p>
<p>I realize many of us are college students and are living in a bubble; but, you can’t really take everything you hear from the news so seriously. Both sides of the political spectrum push some really unscientific stuff to move their political agenda. </p>
<p>The entire phrase “global warming” in itself is misleading. Not all places around the globe are getting warmer. Not only that, we are not entirely certain how rising sea levels will affect the climate. (For example, temperatures may rise but precipitation may also increase.) This is all presuming that global warming is either not human caused or world leaders do not take action.</p>
<p>“Assume the best, prepare for the worst” does not apply to this instance. That parts of the Earth will adhere to a trajectory for decades of increasing temperature and being more arid and to great severity is built on assumptions on top of assumptions. We have no idea what we are preparing for.</p>