NAS - The National Association of Scholars :: Articles The Shape of (Academic)... - The Diigo Meta page

• 11 Nov 09
  

  Steve Shann

  universities future online learning online_learning

• 10 Nov 09
  

  Andrea Zellner
• 08 Nov 09
  

  H Songhai

  NAS - The National Association of Scholars :: Articles The Shape of (Academic) Things to Come 09/17/2009 Peter Wood

  academics future schools technology

• 07 Nov 09
  

  Tom Krieglstein

  A peak...or guess, as to what education might look like in 2030. Kinda funny, kinda true.

  education college futurist school prediction

  • One more preliminary: reporting the future presents problems with verb tenses. For the sake of grammatical clarity, I will write from the perspective of 2030, putting these events-to-come in the past tense.
  • In 2024, the movement to close state colleges and universities crested. This movement began in 2017 with the passage of a ballot proposition in California promoted by the taxpayer group, Citizens for Free College
  • 15 more annotations...
  • • The ballot initiative allowed individual institutions to continue if they could maintain themselves at no cost to the state and if they could afford to lease their land and facilities from the state.
    • phasing out state colleges and universities.
    • DeVry and Kaplan. These two became the Harvard and Princeton of the new era, setting the academic standards that everyone else emulated.
    • the market for content-free intellectual snobbery had simply collapsed.  
    • All of the surviving colleges had highly distinctive programs focusing on some combination of the sciences and the liberal arts, and over half of them were rooted in a religious denomination or faith tradition that emphasized the importance of face-to-face community
    • The “virtuosity of the virtual” was the educational buzz phrase of the time. 
    • “Accreditation associations” were another casualty.
    • Who can forget the 72-year-old Bill Gates pleading to Congress that America would be doomed if it lost its graduate schools?
    • A more lamented casualty of the Great Transition was academic libraries. 
    • Universal Online Library have made it impractical to maintain thousands of expensive repositories of old books. 
    • If you go into one of those remaining archives you can find evidence that were once whole fields with names such as “Women’s Studies” and “African-American Studies.”
    • (The latter had some connection to an old legal doctrine called “diversity” that promoted racial preferences and that expired unremarked on June 24, 2028.)
    • the prevalence of online education has brought with it greater maturity and responsibility among young people, most of whom now finish their first college degrees around age eightee
    • Today, students assume that college is one option among many on the path to finding a rewarding life. Many pick up a college degree along the way while embarked on their first apprenticeship or job.
    • But the change has also brought a more visible gap in literacy. 

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