World Academy Forum on Global Higher Education
2-3 October 2013 • UC Berkeley, CA, USA
Challenges:
Spurred by lower government spending and rising costs for a college education, student debt in the USA has topped $1 trillion. It now exceeds total credit card debt.
As levels of youth unemployment continue to top 80 million world-wide, a college degree is no longer a guarantee of a good job. Should we be educating more people to find jobs or to create their own?
Today millions of new students flock to colleges and universities in emerging countries seeking passports to new jobs which do not exist.
The needs of society are changing so rapidly that businesses throughout the world face the paradox of more and more job applicants who are less and less qualified for the positions they seek.
Education is the foundation system for the progress of civilization and culture, but it is bound by a cumbersome two-generation delay – elders teach their offspring what they themselves learned in their youth from their own elders. Given the tremendous speed of social change, it risks falling further and further behind the needs of fresh generations.
A severe shortage of qualified faculty already plagues systems of higher education in developing countries such as India where faculty vacancies are about 40%.
For the whole world to rise to Western levels of higher education, the global system would have to expand to accommodate an additional 350 million students – that’s equivalent to founding more than 50,000 new Harvards and Stanfords.
Opportunities:
Education is bursting out of the boundaries of brick and mortar. If you were going to found another retail book seller today, would you build another brick and mortar local chain of stores or …?
If you were going to create a new encyclopedia for the world, how would you do it?
The world’s teachers and incubators for emerging technology are finally beginning to emerge. During the past two years, more than 20 MOOCs have been established in the USA alone. Will MOOCs become the model global delivery system for the future or are they forerunners of something else?
Recall the most inspiring college professor of your youth. How many can you think of? Imagine a system in which the world’s most inspiring lecturers were accessible to students everywhere in the world in their own homes and in their own language. Can inspiring higher education be effectively delivered in TED-video fashion?
Steve Jobs dropped out of college so he could attend the courses he really liked – his course in calligraphy was the inspiration for the graphic user interface displaying scalable fonts on the Macintosh. Could his exceptional experience become a new norm for more creative forms of education that foster creativity, original thinking and genius rather than packaged learning?
How can smartphones, tablet computers, e-books, cloud computing, on-line libraries and YouTube videos transform education?
The need for life-long learning has long necessitated changes to provide on-going educational opportunities throughout the working life and even during retirement. How will the double-helix relationship between education and career evolve?
The traditional boundaries separating academia from business are blurring and melting rapidly. Corporations already represent the largest education and training organizations in the world. Will universities be ready and able to compete?
Imagine a global system providing low cost, high quality, state-of-the-art, multilingual higher education. What would it look like? How would it function? What can be done to make it happen better and faster?