In 2025, kids don’t truly “play.” You might work as a Corporate Disorganizer, Unschooling Consultant, or Digital Death Manager. Your best friend might not be human.
These are a few kernels from the six teams of Houston Foresight alums and students that are exploring Student Needs in 2025 on behalf of the Lumina Foundation. Lumina wants to improve college graduation rates from about 40% now to 60% in 2025, and is using the futures expertise of the UH program to help them get there.
This project kicked off right after the new year and the teams — organized around Living, Learning, Playing, Connecting, Working, and Participating — are elbow-deep into alternative scenarios for what students will need and how higher education will respond.
“Lumina is great to work with,” says Andy Hines, the project leader and coordinator of the UH Foresight Program. “To their credit, they wanted to check their assumptions about what 2025 – and beyond – might look like.”
So far, he says the research is showing even the definition of “student” is changing, and “these students are finding new ways of living and learning that might catch higher education off guard.”
We’ll be sharing those disruptive changes on this blog, so check back often. Have trends, articles, ideas, or questions? Leave a comment for the teams! Also, keep up with us here and on at @houstonfutures on Twitter, Vine, and Instagram, where we’ll be posting links to blog posts, interviews with the researchers, and the trends they’re finding.