A Futurist’s Approach to Education

Harvard, Tufts and Columbia universities and other prominent institutions of higher learning have expedited the degree awarding at their prestigious medical schools to meet growing societal needs and demands because of the coronavirus pandemic. For decades, I have looked for empirical and other evidenced-based research that suggest significant and substantiated differences between undergraduate students getting degrees in four years versus three or graduate students getting doctorates in six years.

More and more in the academic marketplace, the master’s degree is offered in less than two years. I suspect this is probably occurring because of demands for graduate-level study beyond the undergraduate degree.

Moreover, some futurists like myself suggest that we need to consider degrees for jobs and careers that don’t exist yet. We need higher education to do more of this type of responsible leadership and responsive reaction to the new world we live in. We need more compressed, accelerated, expedited and socially targeted higher-education options.

This will mean that institutions of higher learning will have to consider what the above universities have done and also move from traditional brick-and-mortar and conventional ways of synchronous pedagogical teaching and learning on campus to asynchronous andragogical teaching and learning off-campus. While pedagogical instruction focuses on the method we use to teach children, the andragogical approach may have more relevance to teaching and learning for college student adults.

Increasingly, the average college student is wanting more asynchronous teaching delivered by online, cyber, and electronic mobility, means and methods. One recommendation we might consider in the higher-education enterprise is converting dormitories and residence halls into hotel-type lodging for students to complete perhaps one-week, once-a-month residencies, and leave other instruction for online or virtual delivery from their home or workplace. These lodging arrangements could also be used for visiting alumni; compressed, accelerated executive-type training by faculty; philanthropic partners and nonprofit funders, and others.

There are other possibilities for libraries, parking lots, social events, and other redirected space on campus to cut down on mounting costs from conventional brick-and-mortar investments. I highlight these recommendations in my forthcoming book, “Now More Than Ever.”

In any event, although the emergence of coronavirus has been imposing, disruptive, untimely, uncomfortable and inconvenient, it is now time to rethink higher learning as we currently conceptualize the enterprise in preparation of what is certain to come next. Time is of the essence.

Let’s use this unfortunate opportunity as an opening to return with new momentum for mitigating unhelpful, unproductive and disruptive social distancing. This, too, will pass, but we still need to plan ahead, be proactive, rethink why, what and how we think, and take charge of our future challenges in the not-so-far-away horizons in the modern higher-education enterprise.