The Future of Higher Education: A New Workshop

My College Planning Team will soon be rolling out a new workshop entitled: “The Future of Higher Education and How You Can Benefit From It.”

We are exited about what’s been happening in higher education during the last few years and and want to share these new developments with parents who continue to be frustrated by the ever rising cost of educating their children. Our new workshop reviews a growing number of alternatives to get a college undergraduate or graduate degree at less than half the current price.

The new workshop begins by defining the problems with the traditional college model. In part two, we will talk about some of the new technologies recently developed that we feel have created the perfect storm for transforming our current model. Part three of the workshop explores some of the exciting experiments going on at some of our institutions of higher learning—including in our own back yard.

Purdue, for example, has become one of the leading innovators of higher education reform in the country and, under the leadership of Mitch Daniels, it looks like the real deal.

Daniels has now frozen tuition for three years running and is paying for it with real cuts in expenses, not reductions in financial aid. He means what he says when he exhorted his university to “adjust our spending to the budgets of the students’ families rather than requiring that they adjust their budget to ours.”

In his open letter his agenda includes the “swiftest possible transformation of the typical course to some version of the flipped classroom that blends the best of the new technologies with time-tested, interpersonal teaching methods.”

Most encouraging is the Purdue’s recent embrace of Competence Based Education.

Mr. Daniels asks three very important questions:

“Why can’t at least some degrees be completed in less than the traditional four years?”

“Why can’t student move ahead as soon as they have demonstrated mastery rather than having to wait for an arbitrary testing date?”

“Why can’t student progress at their own rate instead of being tied to an historic semester calendar?”

The answer to all those questions is obvious. They can—as long as higher education faces up to the reality that the current higher education model is not sustainable.

DePaul, Concordia, University of Wisconsin, and many others are also taking their own unique approaches to making education more affordable and, at the same time, providing more value to today’s American family.

Our workshop will also discuss how MOOCs, personalized adaptive learning, and the new digital badges (Link #5) will also play a part in a new movement that will very likely change higher education as we know it.

Watch for our upcoming announcement about the date and time of this workshop!