The Future of Higher Education by Stella Bentley President Muse recently hosted a leadership conference to prepare information for the Commission's July meeting. I believe over the course of the next decade we will see many of the same things happening in higher education that have happened in health care, banking, and other industries. In fact, terms like standard costs, alliances, and strategic partnerships, that have not been familiar to higher education, now are becoming very much applicable. Higher education has been a kind of feudal system. I believe that in the future competency will emerge as the standard common currency of higher education.
People have for hundreds of years come to campuses to gather information.
That's where we store and enhance it. I believe in the next decade we'll see that invert, and instead of people coming to campus to receive their education, in larger and larger numbers they will get their education primarily off-campus and come to campus for it to be enhanced. Any economy, any society that thinks it will lead simply by educating a stream of young people will fail. The society that succeeds in the future will do so by re-educating the entire population over and over again. That will redefine the role of a university, giving it a much broader mission.