Looking Forward
Trends In Education
A look at the near future for colleges and universities
Business Management Trends
While most of the early, post-Great Recession efficiencies—think standbys like better paper purchasing and deeper cuts
to health care/retiree benefits—have been implemented, Brian
Mitchell and Rick Gaumer of Academic Innovators see several
new business management trends on the horizon for colleges
and universities.
“College costs are largely fixed, [so] there is very little real
discretion in a college operating budget,” says Mitchell via
email. He points to three areas that intersect in that budgeting
process: People, programs, and facilities.
People—Mitchell sees staff increases due to state and federal
regulatory requirements and the need for more employees
in athletics, counseling, and student services departments.
Most staff cuts, however, come from attrition. “Except in financial
exigency, it’s hard to fire people,” he says.
Programs—Colleges continue to turn towards new programs
as the easiest, least controversial way to improve cash flow. Some, according to Mitchell, are choosing
tried-and-true expansions of continuing and
adult education or are moving selectively into
graduate programming. He cautions about the
trend of fairly rapid expansion of planning for
online programming. “Many colleges are simply
not equipped to do so with little understanding
of their market and a relative incapacity
to launch programs of consistent quality,” he
observes.
Rick Gaumer points to new, innovative
programs and activities for students that drive
enrollment. He sees a bump in new and revised
programs mandated by area employers to
better align with required job skills. Gaumer
also spots a ramp up of new affinity groups like
eSports, archery, or biking to feed students’
interest in school.
Facilities—Mitchell points to the trend of
using up debt capacity to improve student
housing, often without understanding the value
of real estate assets “especially in eds/meds
urban centers.” He also sees public universities
outstripping private institutions in their willingness
to consider public/private partnerships
and third-party housing.
Many institutions are looking at strategic
partnerships in three areas: across regions,
across consortia, and with business. Look for
joint admission counselor tours, athletic conferences
that also accomplish strategic academic
program goals, and the incorporation
of residential broadband. Small, rural colleges
will look to USDA loan programs that mix debt
refinancing, facility improvements, and new program
expansion. Some research universities are
expanding their concentration of shared large
research grants across state lines.
And then there’s big data. Gaumer sees
the use of predictive data analytics during the
recruiting and financial-aid award cycle resulting
in increased enrollments and increasing net
tuition. “[By] using big data to better understand
which students are more likely to persist and be
successful and preventing over-discounting on
a student-by-student basis, schools are seeing
both increased enrollment and reduced
discounting,” he says via email.
Sustainability
Dr. Daita Serghi, education programs manager,
Association for the Advancement of Sustainability
in Higher Education (AASHE), sees an integration
of formally separated sustainability efforts around
campus. “Sustainability programs are focusing
holistically on universities’ impacts in all areas of
operations, academics, coordination, and planning
and engagement,” she says via email.
Serghi is also seeing a deeper focus on the
social dimensions of
sustainability. “Sustainability
professionals
know that we cannot
solve the current
climate crisis and the
linked environmental
problems unless
we also address the
social challenges that
accompany it,” she
says. “This climate
emergency is more
complex than just
changing [a] lightbulbs
and we’ll need
all areas of the higher
education community
and our society in general to participate.”
Expect future sustainability pushes to be
more complex. “Demonstration-scale” renewable
energy installations will ramp up with
bigger, often off-site, projects. Campuses are
moving towards electrification to lower emissions.
Conversations around aging heating
plants include carbon capture technology, storage
solutions, and even geothermal.
Serghi predicts foundational-level shifts as
the work of sustainability professionals is changing
direction. “It will be less about focusing on
individual projects and more on institutional
transformation,” she says. “It is easy to get lost
into the day-to-day projects; however, this will
not help…institutions move fast enough to meet
their goals. Professionals will need a broader
focus on building and mobilizing others to ramp
up the sustainability transformation we are
seeking. Instead of pushing against a brick wall,
they are facilitating a movement on campus.”
“Furthermore,” she continues, “campuses
will need to have some serious conversations
regarding resilience and adaptation. There is a
fair amount of climate change that is locked into
the system and unavoidable no matter what
we do; institutions will have to prepare for that:
more extreme weather, rising sea levels if they
are in the coastal area, hurricanes, diseases, etc.
Focusing on developing systems to manage
these unavoidable impacts will be important…in
the years to come.”
Sustainability Part II: Construction Materials
Look for trends that make buildings healthier,
according to Javier Esteban, AIA LEED-AP, principal,
KWK Architects, as WELL Standards and
the high-performance Living Building Challenge
gain steam.
Esteban also points to the new materials
disclosure requirements in LEED V4 as a driver.
“The new materials have been focused a lot
more on its basic components, as well as
the total carbon footprint in the production
and transportation of materials. Especially
important are those products that feature
Cradle to Cradle.”
Design
Gensler has identified several educational
design trends to look out for in the coming
years. One of the most compelling focuses on
the campus experience. Yes, digital learning
is important and will continue to grow, but the
campus experience is still a strong component
to learning.
One of the most important changes on campus
is the rise of the academic incubator.
These incubators will be places to expand
pathways to new careers and partner with
surrounding communities and cities to drive
growth, according to Gensler’s Meghan
Webster and Nathan Kim. Incubators will be a
place for “ideas to thrive, learning is hands-on
and problem-based and budding entrepreneurs
can fail their way to success,” they write on
Gensler’s blog.
As proof they cite The Garage at Northwestern
University, which has incubated more than
300 student-founded startups, and Texas Medical
Center’s TMCx accelerator, which fledges
100 new healthcare startups each year.
Alongside incubators, flexible spaces
throughout the campus will allow learning
in and out of the classroom. The library
will remain a nexus for quiet study while
simultaneously being updated as a
collaborative, tech-friendly center for group
work. Experiential settings will reflect the real
world students will face after graduation.
“Active learning” remains in the driver’s seat
for classroom design, as areas with fixed seating—such as lecture halls—are converted into
flexible spaces. Furniture is modular and moveable,
offers outlets for students to plug in their
many devices, and writing spaces are everywhere;
on the furniture as well as the walls.
Transparency is another design trend. Natural
daylight is being invited deeper into facilities,
along with more glass walls and larger open
spaces, providing visibility into every part of the
building. Glass walls and open spaces, both
vertical and horizontal, encourage inquiry, allow
students to see and be seen in the process of
learning and increase interaction.
For residence halls, there are indicators that
the era of the “luxury dorm” is waning. This
comes amidst growing concerns about rising
tuition and student debt, declining numbers
of high-school graduates, and the changing
tastes of students and their parents. The focus
is slowly shifting from including a myriad
of hotel-style amenities with their requisite
considerable price tag to spaces that are
functional, comfortable, and offer fewer over-the-top amenities but come with a lower cost,
which may also help keep students on campus
instead of them choosing to seek less-costly
off-campus housing.
Technology and Residential Life
The majority of colleges and universities—72
percent—allow students to connect as many
devices as they wish to the residential network.
The devices consuming the most bandwidth
on campus are smartphones, according to the
State of ResNet 2019 Report from the Association
of College and University Housing Officers-International (ACUHO-I). ACUHO-I polled 351 higher education administrators at 200 institutions
about ResNet trends, practices, and
policies to understand the challenges schools
face providing high-performance networks in
residence halls and campuswide.
Smartphones beat out both desktop/laptop
computers and gaming systems as the biggest
campus bandwidth hogs, cited by 73 percent
of respondents compared to 59 percent and 53
percent, respectively. Emerging technologies
such as wearable devices (spanning education,
fitness, and medical devices) are also grabbing
their share of bandwidth capacity, increasing
by about three percentage points over last
year. Voice assistants (such as Google Home
and Amazon Echo), added to the survey for
the first time this year, are already perceived as
large bandwidth consumers by 13 percent of
respondents.
When asked what type of data is using
the most bandwidth, 89 percent of
respondents pointed to TV and video
consumption (e.g., Netflix) and 80
percent cited web-based rich content.
Video games (60 percent) and music
(55 percent) were also a significant
drain on capacity.
To put that bandwidth demand
in perspective, the study found that
nearly three-quarters of schools
(74 percent) dedicate bandwidth of
1 Gbps or more to the campus
ResNet. Twenty-nine percent of
institutions offer 7 Gbsp or more of
ResNet bandwidth. Three out of four
schools responding to the survey
utilize some kind of bandwidth
management practice to make sure
users have the access they need for
both education and entertainment.
The most common tactic, cited by
39 percent of respondents: blocking
activities such as P2P sharing and
music downloading.
Other strategies include shaping
and limiting bandwidth by protocol,
implementation of cache servers, providing
minimum guaranteed service
levels by user, and shaping networkwide
throughput available to streaming video.
Notably, just 10 percent of institutions resort to
individual bandwidth quotas, compared to 32
percent in 2012.
The full report, including an infographic summarizing
results, is available on the ACUHO-I
website.
The Dining Hall
Customization is trending in menus at campus
dining facilities, as surveys indicate today’s
students rated the ability to customize their
meal (i.e. choosing a portion size or some of the
ingredients) as an important aspect of dining.
From yesterday’s simple salad bar, made-to-order
cooking stations have emerged, where
diners can select their ingredients and have prepared
for them a custom meal while they wait,
from sandwiches to stir-frys.
Grab-and-go kiosks are popular, and are not limited to sandwiches and salads. Packages of
veggies and dips or chips and hummus, hardboiled
eggs, cheese, nuts, dried fruit, and yogurt
are also big sellers. These grab-and-go locations
are often located in areas of campus that
can’t support traditional dining halls.
Other food trends to look for include offering
more plant based-options that support vegetarians,
vegans, and people who want to incorporate
more vegetables in their diet.
Smaller and shareable plates are popular.
Tapas, mezze, and antojitos encourage sharing
while cutting down on food waste. This trend
also plays into another shift as the student body
becomes more diverse; the popularity of global
food offerings.
Avoiding allergies is behind Sodexo’s Simple
Servings concept. This service provides dishes
without eggs, milk, tree nuts, and other common
allergens. With more than 120 university dining
centers on board, it remains a trend to watch.
Perhaps the most unexpected food trend on
college campuses is the rise of celebrity chef
partnerships. Sodexo partnered with James
Beard Award-winning chef Art Smith to bring
some of his signature dishes to college dining
centers across the country.
What’s Next?
Higher education is facing a number of challenges
as states vote to freeze or even lower
funding, enrollment slows (including international
student enrollment), student debt is seen as
an unwelcome burden, nontraditional students
continue to change the makeup of the student
body overall, and there is increasing clamor for
verifiable results and workforce-ready graduates.
Still, colleges and universities remain the
proving ground for innovations and innovators,
inspiring discoveries and new ventures.
This article originally appeared in the College Planning & Management July/August 2019 issue of Spaces4Learning.