Some excellent stories on NPR this morning about trends in higher education.
1. Big changes at the SAT
This is obviously big news for college-going students, and it’s consistent with trends identified by the StudentNeeds 2025+ Learning Team. The Team identified Individualized Learning, Reputable Credentials, Meaningful Experiences, Support, Accessibility, Affordability, and Relevant Skills as students’ main learning needs in the future (sound similar to what students need–and unfortunately do not always have–now? We thought so, too). The changes in the SAT show some responsiveness to these needs:
- Change 1: Relevant Skills. According to the College Board, the test will focus less on vocabulary words like “jejune,” and more on ones like “synthesis.” You could argue this is a dumbing down of the test, or you could say they are focusing in on what students will need to know in the future. If a student wants to know a word like jejune, more power to her, but the College Board will leave that to the student to decide.
- Change 2: Meaningful Experiences. Instead of requiring students to complete a writing task, College Board will now offer an optional writing contest and winners are published in The Atlantic. Education at every level is famous for deciding what students need to learn and how they need to show what they’ve learned. This shows a crack in that mindset. Writing something to be read by a test-maker is probably not a meaningful experience for any student. On the other hand, if a student finds writing and being published in a major magazine a meaningful experience (and many will), the College Board will offer that opportunity and not force it.
- Change 2: Affordable Preparation. A big knock against the SAT has been the inequity in access to preparation programs. SAT prep classes are bumping students’ scores up by hundreds of points, but they are incredibly expensive and not feasible for many students. In the new plan, College Board will partner with Khan Academy to offer free, targeted prep online. One of the Learning Team’s scenarios for the future of higher education is that college campuses will become collaborative spaces for social interactions and as-needed group work, while content learning and skill building will be a cobbled-together mix of online (MOOCs), hacked (TechShop), and real-life (internship) experiences. College Board’s recognition that students need multiple access points and their willingness to delegate that to an online provider is a shift. What if universities did the same?
2. Cost keeping students from attending their “first choice” school
Students have prioritized the reputation of a university above all else for a long time. The school’s ranking in U.S. News and its standing among friends and family have often loomed larger than the quality or cost of the educational experience. According to this story, that’s changing because those universities are simply too expensive. Up to this point, the norm has been to go into whatever amount of debt necessary to attend that prized school. If students’ values and priorities shift, and as a group they begin to decide it’s not worth it or not possible, those first-choice schools might find themselves in last place.
None of this is to say the College Board is a beacon of reform nor is it to argue that unaffordable college is a good thing. All we know is that change is happening.
The University of Houston Foresight program is exploring the future of Student Needs 2025 and Beyond for the Lumina Foundation, a leading higher education foundation with a goal of raising higher educational attainment levels from 40% today to 60% in 2025. We are tasked with providing Lumina a view of how student needs are evolving over the next dozen or so years. Put simply, could changes in student needs alter the equation of what higher education will need to providing by 2025 and beyond?
To map the student needs landscape of the future, the Houston Foresight program has assembled a team of two dozen faculty, alums, and students organized around six teams exploring evolving student needs related to living, learning, working, playing, connecting, and participating. We are using Houston’s Framework Foresight process to produce forecasts of student needs and identify the implications and issues they suggest for higher education.