“How much does a college degree cost? What a steal!”
…said pretty much no one ever.
Last week, NPR’s Planet Money ran a story about the sticker price of a university education — they used Duke as an example — and tried to clarify who benefits.
In 1984, it cost $10,000 a year to go to Duke University. Today, it’s $60,000 a year. “It’s staggering,” says Duke freshman Max Duncan, “especially considering that’s for four years.”
But according to Jim Roberts, executive vice provost at Duke, that’s actually a discount. “We’re investing on average about $90,000 in the education of each student,” he says. Roberts is not alone in making the claim. In fact, it’s one most elite research institutions point to when asked about rising tuition.
Ross Shott, UH Foresight alum and adjunct professor, Student Needs 2025+ Learning Team lead, and CEO of Psyphers Group, thinks the colleges need to look at cost from the students’ perspective. “The students are saying ‘This is too expensive for me.’ For universities to respond by saying ‘Well, you’re actually getting a deal,’ is not very helpful.”
Early in the project, the teams identified four types of students that the researchers are using to frame their findings. One emerging trend is a rise in adult and independent learners. More people are waiting to attend college or returning later in life, and others are eschewing a formal degree altogether or in favor of a more organic or personally tailored learning experience or cobbling together the equivalent of a degree program from many sources. Shott sees cost as one driver of this and believes it will continue to push more people into non-traditional learning.
“Traditional students’ needs are currently being dictated by what’s available in the traditional university system, but that model won’t work much longer,” he says. “In fact, maybe the biggest trend in education is more students will move from Traditional/First-Generation categories and become more like Adult/Independent learners.”
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.