The Direction of Higher Education
There is perhaps no greater single event that has had a more significant impact on higher education than the integration of the internet with the higher education delivery system. There are many students that would not have been able to balance school and the completion of their degree if they had not been able to work late into the night performing research and writing papers while avoiding long commutes to a physical campus. As with most other areas of society, progress is forced by necessity. The higher education industry is plagued by increasing costs, policy issues, a lack of graduates prepared for the workforce, viable ways to assess learning, accreditation concerns, assessment validities, a shortage of leadership in institutions of higher education, the death of the “traditional” student, and difficulty recruiting new students.
The Issues
This paper focuses on the financial and technology issues facing the higher education industry today. The higher education sector faces many of the same challenges that other areas of the economy do; the consumer has evolved, technology has advanced, and there must be funding to address the changes in both areas. Along with changes in the economy, student demographics have changed: more students are part-time, older, and non-residential. Additionally, technology has created a level of service expectations that are a challenge for educational institutions to maintain. Technological innovations include aspects such as: e-learning, middleware, software, the expectation that personal devices can be utilized on campus, and the delivery of courses in a completely electronic environment (Grajek, 2013).
While expectations of the higher education system are ever-increasing, Moody’s 2013 outlook for higher education is negative, across the industry (Bogarty, 2013). Significant cash and