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The new reality is that this year with the pandemic serving as a catalyst for many processes in higher education has forced the sector’s leaders acknowledge – the traditional analog on-campus degree-focused learning model is seriously challenged. However, the future of higher education goes far beyond following the major general trends of digitalization and blended learning.

Experts believe that the current crisis is likely to be remembered as a critical turning point between the “time before” to the “time after,” when digital, online, career-focused learning became the fulcrum of competition between institutions. The future of higher education will see the rise of postsecondary alternatives, such as “massively open online courses” (MOOCs) and industry-driven certification programs.

Ben Nelson, CEO of the Minerva Project, a global college in which students live in residential settings in one of four international cities (San Francisco, Berlin, London and Seoul) and take all courses online, expects a rise in public-private partnerships.

To remain financially sustainable, universities of the future will shift towards leveraging innovative financing models such as public-private partnerships – and private equity investments. A public-private partnership, which typically comes with financial sponsorship as well as industry alignment, allows cost reduction of course overheads, and better outcomes for students because of a closer contact with industry. The future of higher education also involves offering services to industry, including consultancy and delivery of co-developed curricula.

Today already, we see how private companies increasingly drive the digital transformation of higher education. According to investment intelligence firm HolonIQ, the first half of 2020 was the second-largest half year for global edtech investment – at $4.5 billion, much of which is focused on higher education and its intersection with the workforce.

Looking at universities 10 years from now, Nelson predicts emergence of learning ecosystems created by governments, higher education institutions and the private sector, which will extend beyond the traditional university campus and three- or four-year course. An early example of this is the Hong Kong-based readtogether.hk forum, a consortium of over 60 educational organisations, publishers, media, and entertainment industry professionals. It provides more than 900 free educational assets, including videos, books, assessment tools, and counselling services.

Some promising postsecondary alternatives that mark the general disrupting trends have been gaining ground over the past several years. One of the most successful alternatives to the traditional 4-year college model is Lambda School, an online school that trains students to become web developers or data scientists offering them a 9-month full-time program or an 18-month part-time program. It first became popular with its pioneering use of income share agreements (ISAs) to offer students a way to enroll and learn the necessary skills for a successful career without paying tuition upfront. Instead, payments are only made after the student becomes employed and earns above a certain level of income. It should be noted that Lambda School does manage to successfully place its graduates in well-paying jobs at top tier companies.

Another promising alternative is Praxis, a one-year program that includes six months of hands on skill building followed by at least six months of time building skills and a track record in a job. Rather than offering a degree, Praxis is focused on building skills and gaining real-world experience that result in a starting point for a successful career. Students can either pay upfront or defer payment until after they have landed a job, and Praxis will even return the cost of tuition if a graduate is unable to find a job within 6 months.

In spite of the diversity of educational models in higher education, Peter Cohen, president of the University of Phoenix, envisions a grimmer picture of a “society of monoculture education,” where national governments dictate what is to be learned. He emphasizes that these days we see the sector self-homogenizing. “You look at most curricula at most universities – they’re exactly the same,” he says. “The fundamental approaches, the sequences of courses are not only the same, they’re also curated the same.” Cohen’s hope is that a decade from now a growing number of institutions “will stand against those trends, will have very distinct educational philosophies with a well-thought-through curriculum of extraordinarily high academic rigor that will focus on actual learning outcomes.”

Speaking of learning outcomes, experts predict that continuous skilling beyond degrees will play a big role in the university of the future. Harvard Business Review provides data showcasing that while students invest their time and money into a higher education with a primary goal of getting a good job, seeing a degree of a reputed institution as a guarantee, employers need practical skills, not just knowledge and titles. Cohen confirms that more than 85% percent of students, a large share of which are working adults, come to the university in order to get a better career. That is why he expects the universities of the future to be better aligned to what industry is looking for – “the sort of bursts of learning that allow people to get those promotions and new jobs that they need.” With careers changing over time due to the rapidly changing technology and society, the idea that you go to school once when you’re young and you have the skills you need for life appears to be long gone, he explains.

The future of higher education will most definitely see a shift away from the flawed logic of “certifying somebody to get a job”. According to Minerva’s Nelson, “none of our formal education trained us for the context situations and challenges that we deal with every single day.” Instead, universities will be focused on training their students for more systematic thinking and equipping them with a unique skill of answering this moment, i.e. being ready to encounter a novel situation.

We can only guess what the future of higher education will be like in 5 to 10 years from now. But one thing we know for sure. Many universities are taking the challenges brought along with the pandemic as an opportunity to innovate and rethink their strategies to become the university of the future the society needs. But those that do not embrace change and hope to revert to traditional ways when the crisis is over are will definitely be left behind.

Across the world, coronavirus has fundamentally changed the student experience. It has also raised a number of questions concerning what universities should offer and to whom. It is obvious that COVID-19 will leave a lasting imprint on the higher education that won’t “go back to normal” as we knew it, pre-pandemic. But the truth is the crisis has just accelerated some disruptive trends of the sector, and even without it, the future of higher education was never going to look like its past. Let us imagine what higher education will be like in 2025-2030.

The first trend that comes to mind when one thinks of the university of the future is of course digitalization of learning environment. The reality showcases that to succeed today, universities have to embrace innovation in education and have strategies to best respond to the latest digital trends with potential roles in teaching, such as augmented reality and artificial intelligence (AI). As the COVID-19 crisis struck, online learning became increasingly mainstream, with nearly every institution moving their programs online, after decades of slow and steady adoption.

Today, we already see the ‘digital divide’ existing among universities. Top private universities have better IT infrastructure and higher IT support staff ratio for each faculty compared to budget-starved public universities. In addition, online courses require educational support on the ground: instructional designers, trainers, and coaches to ensure student learning and course completion.  There is every reason to believe that this divide will be more apparent in the future, as institutions that do not try to maximize their tech-related are not likely to survive.

All experts in education agree that digitalized learning environments becoming the norm implies that higher education of the future will be based on blended learning. Ben Nelson and Diana El-Azar from the Minerva Project, a leading educational innovator, describe the future of higher education as “a mixture of in-person, location-based programmes, experiential teaching, and the flexibility of both synchronous and asynchronous virtual learning.” The model they propose suggests students living together on campus, but still taking part in virtual classrooms.

Hybrid teaching models support student-centricity, provide for a personalized and adaptive learning experience and enhance the cost-effectiveness of large programs. Such models imply that courses and lectures that require little personalization or human interaction can be recorded as multi-media presentations, to be watched by students at their own pace and place, or even delivered to very large audiences at low cost by a non-university instructor or technology platform (e.g. an online education provider like Coursera). Such courses can be commoditized without sacrificing social interaction as one of the important benefits of the face-to-face classroom, which would free resources to commit to research-based teaching, personalized problem solving, and mentorship. For students, that would mean having online classes at their own pace and at much cheaper cost. They would use precious time they spend on campus for all types of activities that require face-to-face engagements. Some years ago, experts predicted that massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX, would kill traditional education (“just as digital technologies killed off the jobs of telephone operators and travel agents”). However, the history proves that certain campus-based activities, such as social networking, group assignments, field-based projects, and global learning expeditions, can enhance the student’s learning experience.

The third disruptive trend is the transition from a degree-based talent pipeline to a skills-based talent pipeline. The nature of jobs is changing, and students need to be able to update their skills throughout their careers. Recent surveys show that students prioritize employability when selecting universities, however, the idea that a college degree singularly prepares students for decades of work has long been outdated. Since many future jobs are not yet defined, universities must equip their students to be lifelong learners who can acquire new skills and give them broad, cross-disciplinary problem-solving skills and entrepreneurial mindsets. Overall demand for continuous education and corporate training is growing.  Scott Pulsipher, the president of Western Governors University, a nonprofit, online, competency-based university, points it out that COVID-19 has created sudden demand for mid-career reskilling and upskilling at unprecedented scale. “In the future, degrees will continue to hold value, not because of the degree credential, but because a degree is composed of many skills and competencies that are valued by employers”, he says.

Connected to that is another major trend – digital credentialing, described as “a rapid shift from static educational records and transcripts, previously an extremely analog process that centered around degrees, to online, digital credentials focused on certificates and certifications that summarize achievement, skills or competency”. In a digital economy where continuous upskilling is needed to keep pace with technological advances and skills outdate in no time at all, universities will move beyond bachelor’s degrees as their primary product, toward more nimble, lower-priced, digital “credentialized packages”. This process is central to achieving the goal of greater education/workforce alignment, which hinges on integrating college and employer HR systems.

However, Nelson and El-Azar emphasize that in the university of the future investment in student-centric learning outcomes will be more important than technological innovation. No technology can improve poor teaching – on the contrary, it can only be made worse by “distractions from the digital world.” Instead, institutions must improve student learning outcomes by updating their curricula and pedagogy, and technological solutions can help in this process. For example, digital learning platforms can measure talk time per student, allowing a professor to evaluate participation objectively.

Change is hard. But with the ongoing crisis accelerating the processes that would otherwise have taken decades to be fully established in institutions of higher education, the university of the future will hopefully be more student-centered, flexible and resilient.