After reading College Unbound by Jeffrey Selingo recently, I began to ponder the value of a college education and the need for higher education to change. Selingo suggests that there are five disruptive forces that will change higher education forever. I’ve outlined them here with my analysis of how they relate to Purdue University:
- Financial instability of colleges. Many colleges are facing financial difficulty for a number of reasons, especially small, private colleges. This does not apply to Purdue since it was very recently given a AAA credit rating, an accomplishment achieved by only four other public universities in the U.S.
- Shrinking state support for public universities. Purdue is in pretty good shape; the State of Indiana is one of the few with a budget surplus, and it has been supporting higher education pretty well compared to some other states.
- The decline in the number of full-paying students. As the middle class in the U.S. continues to shrink or is not keeping up with the rate of inflation, the number of high school graduates able to afford college is getting smaller. Many colleges are depending on out-of-state students and international students to make up the gap, but that has its limits.
- Improved access to non-classroom learning. There are more and more non-traditional means of delivering higher education, and they are improving in accessibility, price, and quality. I believe there will still be a place for the more traditional residential campus like Purdue, but only if we continue to improve and hold costs at a reasonable level when compared with the alternatives.
- The growing gap between the cost of college and earned wages. One in four college graduates who make less than $50,000 a year say their degree was not worth it. An alarming 75 percent of Americans say college is out of reach for most people, which is up from 60 percent just 20 years ago. About 50 percent of Americans think that higher education is doing a poor or fair job in providing value for the money spent.
It is very disturbing to see the decline of the perceived and real value of a higher education in this nation. Creating the greatest higher education system in the world contributed to our nation becoming the greatest on earth.
Higher education has been slow to recognize the need for change and also to implement change to better prepare graduates for the digital age. This is exactly one of the driving forces behind the transformation of the college. We need to ensure that the degrees we award have real and perceived value by industry and society.
The higher education transformation initiative undertaken by the Purdue Polytechnic Institute is one of those leading the nation in addressing the challenges facing higher education. This transformation takes bold thinking and courage to question the status quo, but it is a challenge we have accepted. As the transformation efforts continue to evolve, more people will recognize that something special is happening at Purdue, and it is being led by the Purdue Polytechnic.
