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The future of higher education: what it means for students and educators.

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The Future of Higher Education What It Means For Students and Educators

“The idea that one can earn a degree at the age of 22 and be set for a career has become as antiquated as the pocket watch.”

—Jeffrey R. Brown, dean at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, from his position paper: “ It’s Time to Transform Higher Education ”

  • How do we prepare students and workers to do jobs that don’t even exist yet?
  • For challenges we can’t even imagine yet?
  • To compete in industries and with business models that haven’t even been invented yet?

Higher education is facing one of its biggest periods of unknowns in recent memory. There’s not a single person or aspect of education that hasn’t been utterly shaken by the pandemic.

But that’s not the only source of uncertainty. Technology changes so fast, the skills we master in school are constantly changing and becoming outdated in a matter of years. Some of the most exciting career opportunities might be for roles that don’t even exist yet in industries we can’t even imagine.

We must acknowledge the pace at which technology evolves, and the extent to which the traditional model limits access to education. Experts across higher education suggest that education should look less structured and make room for more variety: calling for new paths, multiple streams, a wider array of credentials — so people can reskill as needed and put those skills to work immediately.

One of those experts is Jeffrey R. Brown, dean at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, author of this report: “ It’s Time to Transform Higher Education .”

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He argues that to fully embrace their missions, higher education institutions and educators must think differently about the suite of educational “products” they offer. In his report, he calls for “new forms of content delivery, new ways to assess learning, and new ways to certify that a learner has mastered various concepts and skills.”

I had a conversation with him to explore those ideas further. He started with a reminder of the original purpose of higher education.

“If we go back to the classical, liberal education, the idea was to make us more rational, more thoughtful, more informed citizens,” he said. “And that has benefits not only to the individual receiving the education, but also to society at large – to teach us that there's a bigger world out there, to think about the world's problems.”

Higher education used to be a luxury for a small segment of society, but it’s become more of a necessity for people to be able to thrive, take care of their families, and solve the grand problems of the world. He said there’s still a role for traditional education, but what we also need today is lifelong, skills-based training that is available to people at any point in their lives.

“That's the transformation that needs to take place,” said Brown. “We're working with a very old model, and that old model is not as well-suited to the needs of today's citizens.”

He outlined three main ways higher education needs to evolve.

Transformation in higher education: 3 ways to make it more accessible, lifelong and skills-based

1. The future of higher education is democratized. He wants to democratize education by taking advantage of technology.

“We need to use technology to expand our educational offerings to be less expensive, to work around people's work and family lives, and to reach people who are not fortunate enough to live in an area where they have access to top scholars and top universities.”

2. The future of higher education is individualized. Once you're operating at scale and with technology, you can individualize education. He recommends expanding our idea of what types of credentials are valued – getting beyond the four-year degree to include sub-degrees or less-intensive credentials, certificates, or digital badges. Some people don’t necessarily need to spend two years getting an MBA, but they could benefit from learning cutting-edge material in business, finance or analytics. There should be recognized credentials for doing so.

“It might be enough for me to take three courses in these areas that I really need right now to reach that next level of excellence in my current job. I can individualize my educational needs to where I am in my life, where I am in my career.”

3. The future of higher education is accessible. He talked about breaking down the many barriers that exist for people to get the education they want. Those barriers might be that it’s too expensive, they’ve got a family and a full-time job, or there are no good schools within a 50-mile radius of their home. Leaders can demolish those barriers with some intentional design.

“We've tried to design our program not just in terms of your ability to choose content, but also with some scheduling flexibility to accommodate when you're able to jump in and out – to truly make it more accessible.”

For more insights on the future of higher education, listen to our conversation below.

Future Generations and Higher Education: Students need to Lead the Way

I have a seven-year-old daughter, so I asked Brown: What's the higher education experience going to look like for her?

“Children need to learn how to learn in multiple environments,” he said. “I know the pandemic was a painful time for lots of school-aged children. But they're going to need to learn to navigate in a world where they have face-to-face interaction, online interaction and, increasingly, virtual interactions – using augmented or virtual reality. Getting exposure to a wide range of learning modalities, in addition to a wide range of fields and materials, is going to be really important.”

Leaders in higher education, take note: change is coming whether you’re ready or not. As Brown put it: “You've basically got three choices. You can lead. You can be a very fast follower. Or you can become irrelevant.”

Higher education has been through the ringer over the past few years. Make sure you don’t simply rebuild what you’ve been doing since the 1600s and miss your opportunity to evolve.

"What makes a great leader today is the ability to tolerate and even welcome a future that's unknown," said Wendy York, dean of Clemson's Wilbur O. and Ann Powers College of Business.

Are you ready to adapt? If you can’t change your institution, how can you claim the ability to shape the next generation of leaders that society needs?

To learn more about how leaders are preparing for the future of higher education, register free for the virtual version of the 2022 Leadership in the Age of Personalization Summit hosted by Clemson University’s Wilbur O. and Ann Powers College of Business on October 14.

Glenn Llopis

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How does virtual learning impact students in higher education?

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, stephanie riegg cellini stephanie riegg cellini nonresident senior fellow - governance studies , brown center on education policy.

August 13, 2021

In 2020, the pandemic pushed millions of college students around the world into virtual learning. As the new academic year begins, many colleges in the U.S. are poised to bring students back to campus, but a large amount of uncertainty remains. Some institutions will undoubtedly continue to offer online or hybrid classes, even as in-person instruction resumes. At the same time, low vaccination rates, new coronavirus variants, and travel restrictions for international students may mean a return to fully online instruction for some U.S. students and many more around the world.

Public attention has largely focused on the learning losses of K-12 students who shifted online during the pandemic. Yet, we may have reason to be concerned about postsecondary students too. What can we expect from the move to virtual learning? How does virtual learning impact student outcomes? And how does it compare to in-person instruction at the postsecondary level?

Several new papers shed light on these issues, building on previous work in higher education and assessing the efficacy of online education in new contexts. The results are generally consistent with past research: Online coursework generally yields worse student performance than in-person coursework. The negative effects of online course-taking are particularly pronounced for less-academically prepared students and for students pursuing bachelor’s degrees. New evidence from 2020 also suggests that the switch to online course-taking in the pandemic led to declines in course completion. However, a few new studies point to some positive effects of online learning, too. This post discusses this new evidence and its implications for the upcoming academic year.

Evaluating online instruction in higher education

A number of studies have assessed online versus in-person learning at the college level in recent years. A key concern in this literature is that students typically self-select into online or in-person programs or courses, confounding estimates of student outcomes. That is, differences in the characteristics of students themselves may drive differences in the outcome measures we observe that are unrelated to the mode of instruction. In addition, the content, instructor, assignments, and other course features might differ across online and in-person modes as well, which makes apples-to-apples comparisons difficult.

The most compelling studies of online education draw on a random assignment design (i.e., randomized control trial or RCT) to isolate the causal effect of online versus in-person learning. Several pathbreaking studies were able to estimate causal impacts of performance on final exams or course grades in recent years. Virtually all of these studies found that online instruction resulted in lower student performance relative to in-person instruction; although in one case , students with hybrid instruction performed similarly to their in-person peers. Negative effects of online course-taking were particularly pronounced for males and less-academically prepared students.

A new paper by Kofoed and co-authors adds to this literature looking specifically at online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic in a novel context: the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. When many colleges moved classes completely online or let students choose their own mode of instruction at the start of the pandemic, West Point economics professors arranged to randomly assign students to in-person or online modes of learning. The same instructors taught one online and one in-person economics class each, and all materials, exams, and assignments were otherwise identical, minimizing biases that otherwise stand in the way of true comparisons. They find that online education lowered a student’s final grade by about 0.2 standard deviations. Their work also confirms the results of previous papers, finding that the negative effect of online learning was driven by students with lower academic ability. A follow-up survey of students’ experiences suggests that online students had trouble concentrating on their coursework and felt less connected to both their peers and instructors relative to their in-person peers.

Cacault et al. (2021) also use an RCT to assess the effects of online lectures in a Swiss university. The authors find that having access to a live-streamed lecture in addition to an in-person option improves the achievement of high-ability students, but lowers the achievement of low-ability students. The key to understanding this two-pronged effect is the counterfactual: When streamed lectures substitute for no attendance (e.g., if a student is ill), they can help students, but when streaming lectures substitute for in-person attendance, they can hurt students.

Broader impacts of online learning

One drawback of RCTs is that these studies are typically limited to a single college and often a single course within that college, so it is not clear if the results generalize to other contexts. Several papers in the literature draw on larger samples of students in non-randomized settings and mitigate selection problems with various econometric methods. These papers find common themes: Students in online courses generally get lower grades, are less likely to perform well in follow-on coursework, and are less likely to graduate than similar students taking in-person classes.

In a recent paper , my co-author Hernando Grueso and I add to this strand of the literature, expanding it to a very different context. We draw on data from the country of Colombia, where students take a mandatory exit exam when they graduate. Using these data, we can assess test scores as an outcome, rather than (more subjective) course grades used in other studies. We can also assess performance across a wide range of institutions, degree programs, and majors.

We find that bachelor’s degree students in online programs perform worse on nearly all test score measures—including math, reading, writing, and English—relative to their counterparts in similar on-campus programs. Results for shorter technical certificates, however, are more mixed. While online students perform significantly worse than on-campus students on exit exams in private institutions, they perform better in SENA, the main public vocational institution in the country, suggesting substantial heterogeneity across institutions in the quality of online programming. Interviews with SENA staff indicate that SENA’s approach of synchronous learning and real-world projects may be working for some online students, but we cannot definitively call this causal evidence, particularly because we can only observe the students who graduate.

A new working paper by Fischer et al. pushes beyond near-term outcomes, like grades and scores, to consider longer-term outcomes, like graduation and time-to-degree, for bachelor’s degree-seeking students in a large public university in California. They find reason to be optimistic about online coursework: When students take courses required for their major online, they are more likely to graduate in four years and see a small decrease in time-to-degree relative to students taking the requirements in-person.

On the other hand, new work considering course completion during the pandemic is less promising. Looking at student outcomes in spring 2020 in Virginia’s community college system, Bird et al. find that the switch to online instruction resulted in an 8.5% reduction in course completion. They find that both withdrawals and failures rose. They also confirm findings in the literature that negative impacts are more extreme among less-academically-prepared students.

Online learning in the fall and beyond

Much more research on virtual learning will undoubtedly be forthcoming post-pandemic. For now, college professors and administrators should consider that college students pushed online may be less prepared for future follow-on classes, their GPAs may be lower, course completion may suffer, and overall learning may have declined relative to in-person cohorts in previous years. These results seem particularly problematic for students with less academic preparation and those in bachelor’s degree programs.

The research is less clear on the impact of virtual instruction on college completion. Although course completion rates appear to be lower for online courses relative to in-person, the evidence is mixed on the impact of virtual instruction on graduation and time-to-degree. The negative learning impacts, reduced course completion, and lack of connection with other students and faculty in a virtual environment could ultimately reduce college completion rates. On the other hand, there is also evidence that the availability of online classes may allow students to move through their degree requirement more quickly.

As the fall semester approaches, colleges will need to make critical choices about online, hybrid, and in-person course offerings. Maintaining some of the most successful online courses will enhance flexibility at this uncertain time and allow some students to continue to make progress on their degrees if they get sick or cannot return to campus for other reasons. For those transitioning back to campus, administrators might consider additional in-person programming, review sessions, tutoring, and other enhanced supports as students make up for learning losses associated with the virtual instruction of the past year.

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