About Huron

The Future of Higher Education

The successful university will be one that understands what students want, but also the deeper currents that are driving change in our society in all areas: culture, technology, learning styles, careers. The Future of Higher Education focuses on issues universities must consider if they are to plan successfully for the future.

Global Education Insights Podcast: Globalization with Innovative Academic Programs and Outreach
Dr. Dina Dommett, the Associate Dean for Programmes in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), has been at the center of developing the strategy for global engagement for the business programs at her institution. In this podcast, she discusses LSE’s approach, which is based on multiple partners and distributed learning to make maximum impact without ever building another campus.

From Solving for X: Higher Education Impact
At turns caustic and inspiring, Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, talks in this video about his attempt at the “transformative reconceptualization” of the American university. Universities, he says, are “highly constrained” and “produce limited tools for the most part, compared with what you would think a few million people could do.” He wants to turn ASU into a “moonshot enterprise” where impact is more important that output. His talk was recorded at a recent gathering of scientists and entrepreneurs focused on radical approaches to intractable issues.

Global Education Insights Podcast: Leveraging University Strengths in Evolving Educational Ecosystems
Dr. Jamil Salmi, director of the World Bank tertiary education program and author of the recent book The Challenge of Establishing World-Class Universities, sat down with Edwin Eisendrath, Managing Director, Huron Education, to discuss to discuss changes in global higher education.

From The Atlantic: Envisioning a Post-Campus America
This writer envisions higher education being wholly transformed by low-cost competitors and online education. The results: 95 percent of tenure-track faculty positions are eliminated, and universities stop being centers of research. It’s a bleak vision for today’s universities, but these issues deserve extensive discussion on campuses.

White Paper: Research Universities Commercialization and Entrepreneurship: New Strategies for Success
New strategies or approaches are needed to improve the effectiveness of university commercialization efforts, as are new yardsticks for success. To many universities, the only measure of success has been the dollar value of research discoveries that have been patented or licensed. This white paper argues that universities need to take a broader view and see themselves as an essential part of an innovation ecosystem. Such systems are like a series of overlapping communities with university researchers, students, and infrastructure at the core. Successfully nurturing such an ecosystem is likely to be more important to the long-term health of a research university than the success of any individual discovery.

From Mashable.com: The Future of Technology, in the Eyes of One Innovator
A lot has been written about the impact that ubiquitous displays and open operating systems would have in the way we communicate and learn. But to see it as it might be one day is something else! Corning’s vision last year of a touchscreen technology, A Day Made of Glass, was a YouTube phenomenon, gathering 17 million views. Now, the company has taken the vision even further in a new video, demonstrating a vision for how touchscreens and unlimited bandwidth would affect classroom learning, video-conferencing and other aspects of our lives. The impact on higher education would be profound.
Mashable.com/YouTube

From the Pew Research Center: Young, Underemployed and Optimistic
Do you want to understand more about the worldview of your students? This comprehensive survey by the Pew Research Center finds that while people under age 25 have higher unemployment than other age groups, have put off marriage and children, and taken jobs just to pay the bills, they remain sanguine about their careers and the other life possibilities in front of them. Meanwhile the rest of society is adjusting to this shift, and become more accepting of the idea that perhaps financial independence doesn’t start until 25.