The Future of Higher Education - 6

Part 1: The Global Context
to include improved health care, expanded
public health, increased economic wealth, and
improvements in the status of women: more
education, greater work opportunities, and
access to more reproductive capacities. The
results have many implications for each culture
undergoing the transition, from reconfiguring
the labor pool to supporting senior services and
staffing K-12 schools. The world will grapple with
the process for years to come.
The primary impact on higher education is the
gradual reduction of the traditional-age (18-22
years old) pipeline. It's important to realize that
the demographic transition occurs unevenly by
geography, with some areas (New England, many
rural districts) aging the quickest, while others
(immigrant-intensive cities, Texas) following
more slowly. Immigration can slow down the
transition, as migrants tend to be younger
than their destination populations. The overall
trend gives colleges and universities a group of
strategic choices. Do they increase competition
for a shrinking student pool, increase their
marketing to younger areas, pivot to teach more
adults and senior citizens, more aggressively
recruit students from the developing world, or
seek to expand their population by teaching
online?
A second major demographic trend concerns
the changing racial and ethnic makeup of the
United States. Generally speaking, the Caucasian
population has started to decline as a proportion
of the whole, while two non-white demographics
- Latinos and Asians - continue growing in both
absolute and proportional terms. The nation is
headed towards becoming a majority-minority
country, where no one ethnicity holds numerical
majority status. As recent history has shown, this
is a politically and culturally fraught process.
As with the previous trend, we should expect to
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work through the racial/ethnic transformation for
some time to come.
The implications for higher education are
perhaps more evident than they were for aging.
Institutions are mounting a range of strategies to
recruit and sustain students of color: renaming
campus sites, creating and expanding support
programs for non-whites, changing curricula,
increasing representation among faculty
and staff. Minority-serving campuses, such
as historically black colleges and universities
(HBCUs) and predominantly Hispanic-serving
institutions (HSIs), are gaining attention,
enrollment, and perhaps some public support.
Additionally, campus political movements also
occur to various degrees of intensity, depending
on the institution and its racial climate.
MACROECONOMICS
Turning to the domain of economics, we
can discuss two macro trends with powerful
impacts on academia. First is the long-running
transformation of the labor market. During the
mid-twentieth century the majority of workers
worked in or adjacent to industry. Since then,
industrial jobs have declined for various reasons
(offshoring, automation) while service jobs have
rapidly grown to become the new majority.
Information-centric jobs, such as computer
programming, are often very competitive, but
constitute only a small slice of the overall labor
market. This new world of labor appears to be
durable for the moment, given the many service
needs of an aging population, the growing
allied health care world, the very slow adoption
of robotics, and the unlikelihood of re-shoring
industry to the United States at scale.
This has direct implications for higher education
as institutions consider how best to support
students as they enter or seek to improve their
Part 1: The Global Context
The Future of Higher Education

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Future of Higher Education
