Learning is the transcendent mission of education. Writer, futurist, and businessman Alvin Toffler asserts in his seminal volume, Future Shock, that “The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Toffler implies that the acquisition of new knowledge, skills and competencies is neither linear nor fixed. Furthermore, he casts learning as a lifelong endeavor that involves individuals interrogating what they have learned in the past and discriminately generating new understandings that may dismantle extant habits, beliefs, assumptions and practices. Over the course of one’s lifetime, learning spans time, place and space. Thus, learning is an inherently mobile endeavor.
Strategic enrollment management (SEM) in an era of learner mobility broadens extant institutional focus on students and enrolling to encompass learners and learning. Once heralded for its marketing and administrative origins, contemporary SEM has evolved within institutional academic contexts. Beyond merely attracting and enrolling students, SEM also involves the movement of credits, courses, programs, academic entities and even institutions. Expert SEM leaders are keen to foster learner mobility by way of personalized instructional and developmental journeys, as learners amass knowledge, skills and competencies over a lifetime from various entities that provide learning opportunities and experiences (e.g., colleges and universities, workplaces, professional and trade associations, social and service organizations, military branches, churches).
Learner mobility focuses on educational subjects. Conversely, learning mobility places primacy on educational delivery in terms of how learners receive, consume, are assessed and granted credit for instructional components and learning experiences. When and where learning occurs—and who assesses, recognizes and asserts it as having met specified criteria for applicability—has increasingly become loosely coupled. Changes in education providers, learner participation patterns, teaching and learning paradigms, and faculty roles are altering higher education’s form and function. Notable changes in instructional design, content delivery, learning assessment, competency determination and credential authentication comprise a credentialing ecosystem that is confounded by an ever-changing educational landscape.
Shifts in the temporal and spatial structuring of learning broaden learners’ educational access and capacities. This is particularly the case for those who choose to enter the workforce and attain higher education in non-linear fashions, in comparison to those who opt for archetypal immediate from high school to collegiate rites of passage. The two options yield different learner journeys. However, learner needs and demands on neither trajectory is wholly distinct. The future is likely to present more congruent learning experiences for learners to transverse educational pathways, earn relevant credits and meaningful credentials, attain expansive knowledge and durable skills, and demonstrate their associated capabilities and competencies within and across multiple contexts. In this regard, the future of strategic enrollment management is both expansive and promising. That aspirational future, however, is contingent on existential changes in higher education at the intersection of industry regulation, institutional competition, learner empowerment and employer influence. Moreover, the complex interplay across educational systems and symmetry between liberal, vocational and professional education yield sundry postsecondary educational pathways.
Future Enrollment Considerations
The enrollment futures of institutions and their respective students are intrinsically tied to learner and learning mobility. Colleges and universities are expanding their educational offerings and ramping up the modularization and certification of alternative, innovative and incremental (i.e., stackable) credentials to increase enrollment revenue, subsidize mission-centric academic offerings and extend institutional reach into corporate and global marketplaces. Furthermore, higher education lawmakers, regulators (e.g., accrediting agencies, state departments of education, federal student aid entities) and institutions are (re)organizing statutory and institutional structures to cultivate enrollment-related synergies, partnerships and workforce connections. Altogether, enrollment-inducing initiatives focused on lifelong learning evince an imminent evolution of strategic enrollment management.
Many higher education institutions must reconsider how they meet their respective student- and institutional-success imperatives. Learning mobility creates educational access and opportunities that enable underrepresented, underserved and disenfranchised learners to be seen, heard, felt and experienced in academic, professional and personal settings. However, in terms of reaching and serving more learners, higher education institutions must meet those individuals where they are and demonstrate an authentic appreciation for and understanding of what learners hope to achieve and educational opportunity costs with respect to time and money.
Time is arguably one of the greatest structural inequities for future learners. The adage “time is money” is ever-present for learners whose life circumstances require them to work, engage in childcare or provide caregiving while pursuing postsecondary education. For some learners, all or a combination of those competing priorities (and likely others) are ever present. Pursuing a college education and earning associated credentials, however, is essential to many individuals’ desires and aims toward breaking intergenerational resource scarcity and setting themselves and their families on a path to financial security. Within collegiate domains, many faculty and staff are similarly situated in their own lives and have benefited as recipients of such an education and strong transfer credit policies, articulation agreements, program pathways and credits for prior and experiential learning. Case in point: numerous learners are concurrently personnel and students at the nation’s colleges and universities.
Learners contribute time, in addition to effort and skill, to their postsecondary education learning interactions. Likewise, educators in these domains are compensated for their time, in addition to skill and effort, within their respective role in those learning interactions. Thus, learner and learning mobility are intrinsically tied to how time is perceived, used, evaluated, awarded and rewarded. Woven into the knot is the complex and changing academic workforce and how faculty are structured, governed and compensated for their time and efforts. As we look toward the future, institutions that reconsider and innovate their time-bound policies, practices and cultures will thrive. Conversely, many institutions that cling to time-honored traditions in those regards will struggle to survive and thrive in the unprecedented, fast-paced transformation of higher education.