Keller's Higher Education and the New Society

What should our colleges and universities look like?

Understanding the main question:

How is the university impacted

by today's societal challenges?

What are the main challenges and driving questions in this discussion?

Has the university already responded?

Is it necessary to respond?

If so, how should institutions respond?

Well. Let's dig in a little and walk through Keller's work and figure out how the university is impacted by today's society and what the university must do in response.

Keller Argues there are four main ingredients to the new society in which colleges and universities must respond.

+ Decline in birth rate and increased immigration means that student bodies will be more diverse than ever.

+ Improved health care and the baby boomers make for a major segment of the population that will live longer.Aging population (baby boomers live forever).

+ Traditional family is disappearing. Focus on individual rights and neglect of community needs.

"Under advanced capitalism, however, the state has grown stronger and more intrusive, while the stable, two-parent family is the social institution that seems to be withering away" p. 28.

+ Third Technological revolution of bits and bytes has major consequences for higher education.

+ While data collection and research has already significantly changed in within higher education. New communication technology will determine in large part what the future of higher education looks like.

+ After the post WWII economic boom the American economy was faced with financial struggles and challenges starting in the 1970s.

+ The American economy moved from a self sustaining production economy to an knowledge economy in large parts do to higher education.

+ Industries and universities now work closer together than ever before.

"Universities went from the polite periphery to the vital economic and cultural center of society" p. 57

- Demographics

- Technology

- Economy

- Sociocultural Challenges

+ Higher education more than ever has pushed for equal opportunity regardless of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation. population

+ More women and black's in position of influence than ever before

+ Negative side-effects? With the push for equal opportunity and self-expression common believes and goals become nearly impossible.

"For higher education, this idea of individualism erodes the idea of a common core of learning for all students and makes a college education that includes character guidance nearly impossible" p. 64

So we know about the societal challenges.

What then is the problem?

Well... universities are like Rube Goldberg Machines.

In a Rube Goldberg creation a whole lot needs to happen for one minor task to be completed. Keller quotes Ernest Boyer,

How has the university responded?

"Adjustments to the new environment have been incremental and within traditional structures developed a century ago" p.68

In response to rapidly change demographic trends the higher education industry has...

The technological explosion has lead to...

The economic reality of post-1970s America has demonstrated itself within higher education in these ways...

Sociocultural change has resulted in...

While significant changes has taken hold within the academy. All these changes have been within the existing structures of colleges and universities. Few changes have fundamentally changed how education is done in America - change has been incremental.

The university is thus a place that has been affected in major ways be societal change and cultural change. Yet it remains an institution that changes slowly (think Rube Goldberg) and in which changes have been incremental in the past decades. The question thus is - in light of the societal pressures and the nature of the modern university.

What can be done?

Keller makes four suggestions.

Adjust Segmentation

"But of America's more than thirty-eight hundred accredited colleges and universities, only fifty or sixty would be considered premier research universities like Cornell. At the 3740 other colleges and universities, teaching not research is most important" p.106

Accommodate Adult Learners

Rethink Departments and Disciplines

Revise Cost Structures

- spends $150 million annualy on special academic help for athletes

- pays no taxes do to its educational affiliation

- graduates roughly 40% of its student-athletes

Where does that leave us?

"the urgent task... is now to help restructure U.S.higher education for the nation's new conditions" p.131

Works Cited:

Keller, G. (2008). Higher Education and the New Society. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Willem de Ruijter

Geneva College: MA of Higher Education

HED 514: Great Issues in Higher Education

May 10th, 2013

+ The dominant influence of academic departments and disciplines limits research that is not pre-determined to be vital to the discipline.

+ Reducing the bachelors degree to 3-years or continuing studies through the summer moths are two cost-saving strategies

+ Athletic Division I reform is perhaps the clearest place to make lots of financial gains.

+There is a need to reform an industry that...

+ In an age of "massification" there is a need to more clearly define our higher education system

+ There is a need for a system where the relative small % of people who are research minded can do research and those who are not can simply complete an education that will be of benefit for them in earning a stable job with fair compensation

"But today, adult enrollments may be approaching 35-40 percent" p. 117

+ With our rapidly increasing adult population. Educational structures need to be adjusted to their schedules and rhytems if institutions want to properly serve them

+ Instead of making incremental changes within the existing system

we must focus on changing parts of the system

+ Instead of competing with other institutions

we need to collaborate for the benefit of the student

So in light of the societal context.

+Tuition costs have risen by approximately 250% for 4-year colleges.

+ Full-time faculty have been cut in favor of more affordable part-time faculty and teaching assistants.

+ Numerous online resources for students such as registration, accounts, grades.

+ Copious amounts of technological purchases and investments in institutions across the country.

+ Greatly increased adult education classes

+ Expanded financial aid for students with greater financial need

+ Increased student affairs programs and services

+ Handicap accesible campuses

+ Textbooks that have been re-written to include the histories and stories of minorities

+ Political correctness in the academy

+ An increased cultural relativism that has accelerated social change

"Governance on most campuses we visited was an ineffective Rube Goldberg-like arrangement" (p.67)

like these...

(one might call them four challenges)

Higher Education

and the

New Society

by

George Keller

Understanding Higher Education Workshops

Understanding our society affects our academy and how in turn the academy respons

An overview of great thinkers and how their thoughts influence our workplace