College at Work

Conditions are gathering to spark major shifts in the structure, processes, and objectives of American higher education. As we move toward and into the next century, models of higher learning will become more heterogeneous, programs of study less fixed in time and place, and their duration more fluid. For most Americans, there will be progressively less emphasis on traditional degrees and more on the validation of competence. The distinction between training and education will all but disappear; learning and earning will become virtually synonymous. Technology will both decentralize learning and individualize it. Th home, the car, and the workplace will all become the campus. Indeed, the whole notion of degrees as we know them may disappear over the course of the next hundred years -- not a long time in the transformation of large social structures -- to be replaced by a series of progressively more complex and sophisticated certificates of accomplishment. In this article I summarize the forces propelling these changes, focus on a unique corporate-college partnership as an example of a new educational paradigm, and argue the need for a concerted effort by teachers and policy-makers in American higher education to help rebuild American workforce competence.(*) The Economic Pressure for Change Thirty years ago my senior year at a private college in the northeast cost just about $3,000. Today a year at that college, and most others like it, costs abou $25,000. Had anyone made such a forecast to my parents, who, with modest contribution from me, paid all of the bill, they would have scoffed at the possibility. No one, they would have said, would dare charge that much, because no one could (or would) pay it. It sounds equally foolish to suggest that thirt years from now those same colleges could cost $175,000 to $200,000 a year, yet that is what will result if the same rates of change pertain. No doubt some families will still be able and willing to pay those rates. But I must believe that this inflationary spiral, with no real sign yet of slowing, will drive mos families away from private colleges -- and most such colleges out of business - unless dramatic change occurs in the way they are supported and conduct their business. Public education faces equally grim financial realities. The collapse of the Massachusetts miracle five years ago, with its consequently devastating impac on that state's educational system, was only the beginning of a relentless progression across the country. In New York, while public higher education enrollments have grown steadily, budgets for the State University system (SUNY) were cut ten times between 1988 and 1992. Tuition doubled between 1990 and 1992 Tax support for SUNY has fallen by more than $400 million (22 percent) since th mid-1970s; for the City University system (CUNY) it has fallen by $350 million (33 percent) since 1970-71. SUNY alone has accumulated more than $400 million i needed repairs to campus facilities; in a good budget year it might get $5 million from the state to address those needs, and last year it got nothing |3, pp. 31-38~. In Ohio, public higher education faces the same plight: despite increasing enrollments, public college budgets have been cut three times in les than two years. In the latest round, more than half of the cuts were taken from higher education although it makes up only 12 percent of the state's budget |10~. In Oregon, Measure 5 put severe limits on property taxation and now threatens to cripple the state's higher educational system. In these states and many others, not only can thousands of students no longer attend college, but those lucky enough to be able to attend are increasingly unable to enroll in classes they need in order to graduate on schedule, thus extending by at least a semester and often a year the time and expense it takes to earn their degrees. Many other students are forced to attend college part-time because of their own deteriorated finances and the large increases in public school tuitions. …