Business Change Management

The October 26, 2020 New York Times article entitled “Colleges Slash Budgets in the Pandemic, With ‘Nothing Off-Limits,’” does not offer an encouraging outlook for higher education. The article says that every institution, large and small, is being forced to initiate budget cuts to close widening gaps in financial shortfalls. Why? Less students, less fees, less meal and dormitory dollars, and more expenses, accelerating a trend that was already in the making!

Public institutions increasingly forced to do more with less, driving up the price

Combine The Times article with one from Astra Taylor in the October 30, 2020 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education where she writes, “Unfortunately, recent decades have been particularly hard on America’s fragile system of public higher education: State funding has been slashed, student debt has skyrocketed, and the for-profit college sector exploded. Higher education has become an ever-more costly commodity.” This article also presents a very bleak outlook for higher ed as it is currently constructed.

Do you see what we see in the world of higher education? Is this the death of higher education institutions as we know them?

For the past 18 months, I have been blogging about higher education.

Part of our portfolio of assignments includes strategic work we have conducted for higher learning institutions. Challenging is the disconnect between the institution and the workplace. There appears to be a built-in bias against the needs of industry. This resistance has created a reluctance on the part of administrations and faculty to understand what their students will need to succeed after they leave the university. Why are colleges failing their students?

Our research among employers delivers a recurring theme: please, they say, you are sending us students with excellent technical skills but without the people skills that they need to communicate, coordinate, collaborate and creatively solve problems. Industry seems to be responsible for those softer skills that higher education should be instilling in their students.

In a recent Atlantic magazine, Bryan Caplan, author of The Case Against Education, writes a very caustic, albeit truthful analysis of the current state of higher education in the U.S.

In this particular article among many he has written, The World Might be Better Off Without College for Everyone, there is a litany of reasons why our approach to educating our population for society, for jobs, for productive lives, is flawed, failing and fallen.

Last month I blogged about the urgent need for colleges to prepare today’s students for high-paying jobs in the workforce. I made the following points:

1. College is expensive enough. Let’s not put young people into debt without any way out. Graduating into a minimum wage job doesn’t cut it and makes the return on investment for a college education microscopic.
2. Better-paying jobs that allow for lifelong skill-building is key. Investing four years and a whole lot of money is tough, particularly when the only jobs graduates can find once they get out are part-time minimum wage without benefits. As a career path, this makes no sense.
3. Is a classical liberal arts education still viable or is workplace skill-building needed? Or do we need both?
4. Colleges and universities as institutions must bear some level of responsibility for their graduates’ careers. It’s a two-way street. The higher education industry doesn’t stop when a student graduates. Its role can last far longer with better results.
5. Industry, through relationships with educational institutions, must be an active part of the solution.

Now I’d like to build on these observations with some additional comments.