She starts up her multi-player game. Her parents think it’s a waste of time, but she doesn’t see it that way. It’s fun and exciting and she’s good at it. Not to mention that playing it helped her understand and explain that global conflict to her cousin last week. She easily maneuvers the first challenge. She makes a mental note to tell her parents that these problem-solving skills, which have made her quite popular among her gaming “friends” (who she’s never met in person but knows better than her own family), will come in handy once she’s trying to support herself as an adult. Challenge 2 begins, and thoughts of working pass. For now she’s just playing. And learning. And participating, connecting, and living, too.
Our Student Needs 2025+ Project team came together for an implications workshop last Friday, and we left with the feeling that our six domains are coming together, too.
We agreed that the distinctions between our six topics are blurring – dramatically. The suppliers of our working, learning, connecting, participating and living experiences operate as if they are separate activities, but when we put ourselves in the shoes of students, we wondered, how can they tell which activity they’re engaged in at that moment, or, for that matter, do they care? Our research shows that the days of compartmentalizing those aspects of life will soon be over. In the future, students will need providers who can seamlessly meet several – if not all – those needs at once. Higher education, of course, is focused on learning, but how will it handle the bleeding in of all these facets?
The workshop began with a review of our four student types: traditional, first generation, adults and independents, and then we reviewed the alternative future forecasts in each of the six domains. We broke into four groups, each representing a different student type, and used futures wheels and small group discussion to identify specific student needs for our assigned type. The teams generated no fewer than 142 different student needs of the future.
Our next steps are to analyze and synthesize these takeaways and combine them with the work we did at our March 1 gathering. The full picture of Student Needs 2025+ is still fuzzy, but I can tell you this: It’s all coming together. Stay tuned.
Andy Hines
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.