Higher education is at a pivotal moment, adapting to demographic shifts and evolving student expectations that challenge traditional institutional models. To meet modern learners’ demands and create sustainable educational paths, colleges and universities must embrace innovative business models, interconnected digital tools and a flexible, student-centered approach to lifelong learning. In this interview, Chris Cassirer discusses how the demographic shift is changing higher ed and meeting new needs—and how digital tools can help.
The EvoLLLution (Evo): How has the demographic shift in student populations influenced the overall approach to delivering a modern student experience across higher ed?
Chris Cassirer (CC): The demographic shift is influencing the strategic discussions but not the strategic behaviors of many colleges and universities. The fact is the demographic cliff is here. Population growth has declined, and there are just not enough students aged 18 to 25 to fill classrooms, especially among more traditional institutions that teach face-to-face.
A quick scan of the higher education marketplace and rate of college closures among more traditional institutions makes this clear. Those who are failing to adapt—and adapt quickly—are unable to drive sufficient margins to support their missions. Rather than dealing head-on with the facts, many are watching and waiting, hoping things will turn around.
My perspective is a business that fails to evaluate the underlying assumptions of its model and adapt to its customers’ changing needs will eventually go out of business. Case in point: We all seem to have forgotten the lessons of Blockbuster Video. The market began to shift to online, streaming, subscription pricing and new ways to purchase and rent movies. The customer wanted something new and modern; the video chain chose to stick to their knitting and lost.
At Excelsior, we know that 70 to 85% of the higher education market is comprised of adult students, a demographic traditional higher education underserves. For the past 50 years, we have been at the forefront of serving adult students with online, asynchronous programs that recognize prior learning and experience and operate with a liberal transfer credit policy. Although today we are in a healthy financial position, we are not resting on our laurels. The student-customer’s needs continue to evolve, and a one-size-fits-all approach will not work for any institution. We are adapting by adding hybrid, synchronous and low-residency immersive learning experiences and developing competency-based approaches to meeting the student’s needs for variation in learning opportunities.
Evo: What are some challenges in meeting these students’ new needs?
CC: Colleges and universities are continually facing the need to achieve their missions while balancing a trifecta of competing priorities. Lowering costs, improving quality and expanding access to education are intertwined. Developing strategies that address all three challenges while ensuring value is becoming more difficult. Often, institutions will focus on one of these priorities at the expense of the others.
For example, lowering the cost of a postsecondary degree is a challenge for both students and colleges and universities. Students face a Sophie’s choice about whether to invest in a degree. Institutions are faced with demonstrating and convincing students of the value of investing in education.
An article recently showed that cost is the top regret for those who have earned a college degree. On the other side, the top reason for not attending college is also financial. For institutions, the cost of delivering an education continues to increase. Adding value or seeing value in a degree is becoming less clear to student-customers.
Excelsior is facing similar challenges for a large segment of our student-customers. Since our founding more than 50 years ago, serving active military students has been critical to our mission. Despite our commitment to providing access and demonstrating the value of an Excelsior education, the federal military tuition reimbursement rate has remained at $250 per credit per semester for the past 20 years without any adjustments for inflation. We are facing a dilemma of how to serve military students, given the low reimbursement rate.
Our leadership team is not sitting still and hoping things will change. Instead, we are very proactive in our efforts to find a solution path. Recently, our president acted and reached out to the Department of Defense (DOD) decision-makers directly. In a meeting with DOD officials, we clarified the challenge we are confronting. While we are early in the conversation, DOD officials recognized that we need to find a different solution path and collaborate to challenge the current military tuition reimbursement policy by asking for a rate increase.
Evo: How can higher ed leaders start overcoming some of these obstacles?
CC: It may be harsh criticism, but many institutions are aware of the issues and challenges but not acting fast enough. As difficult as it may be to engage in these conversations, leaders need to be more transparent about the financial situation and accept that the time to act is now.
Unfortunately, a great deal of time and energy is not spent talking about issues and challenges. In fact, institutions often go out of their way to avoid it. The fear of creating panic is often confused with the business need to create a sense of urgency. If the conversation does occur in the open, intellectualizing the problem and engaging in endless debates about who is wrong and who is right get in the way of testing solutions and changing behavior.
The topics that often lead to the most friction are in academic affairs. Changing curricula, adapting teaching and learning approaches, and expanding the institution’s focus to serving adult students become polarizing subjects rather than opportunities to share responsibility for change.
Leaders need to tell the truth and acknowledge that, if the institution does not come together and align, everyone will go off a cliff together. It’s striking that college and university leaders are often fully aware something is wrong for a long time before they do something about it. The reality is that trustees also know it and faculty and staff sense it, but the conversation about what to do never happens until it is too late.
Lastly, I would say that higher education leaders need to take seriously the fact that most do not have the advanced and more sophisticated business skills of managing complex organizational challenges today. Few higher education leaders have had any training or experience in managing mergers, acquisitions or institutional closures, nor navigating the issues while putting students’ needs first. While college leaders do not need to know everything, they do need a lot more training and skills in these areas on their leadership teams.
Evo: What role do digital tools play in transforming student engagement and retention for the modern learner?
CC: An integrated technology roadmap is the backbone of any college or university’s growth. Student information systems, learning management systems and customer relationship management systems need to be connected. From the point of inquiry to admission to registration, graduation and becoming alumni, institutions need to be able to manage the end-to-end student experience. These systems often do not connect, and there is not one unique identifier that follows the student.
Different groups such as enrollment, advising, faculty and support staff don’t share subsets of information in a way that can positively impact engagement and retention. Marketing tells the story, students inquire, the enrollment team cultivates a lead, a student is admitted, then a hand-off occurs to registration and advising. Students start taking courses, and another hand-off occurs to faculty. Before interventions to better support a student or ensure they are making progress can be identified, it is too late.
Digital tools that can proactively identify at-risk students are one example of a way to improve retention. Tools that can better connect faculty to academic advisors and vice versa are another. Tools to track and study faculty teaching behaviors in the course room week to week are yet another way to leverage digital resources to determine if students are making progress from the start to the end of a course. In short, digital tools are essential for ensuring both real-time interventions and gathering more comprehensive data to make sure everyone who engages with a student is aligned in their efforts to promote student success.
In the course development process and instructional design approach, colleges and universities need to ensure faculty and instructional design and development staff are collaborating to include advancing technologies in the course room experience. Augmented and virtual reality, simulations and adaptive learning technologies are no longer nice to have but essential in creating rich and engaging learning experiences. These digital tools will not replace faculty’s essential role. Instead, they are ways to enhance teaching excellence and free up more faculty time for high-value and impactful teaching practices that can only be delivered through human interaction.
Evo: In what ways should higher ed prepare students for lifelong learning in response to the changing job market?
CC: Oftentimes, we approach education as one and done as opposed to creating pathways from credential to credential and program to program. Preparing students for lifelong learning requires colleges and universities to focus on lifetime student-customer value. When a student expresses interest in pursuing a higher education credential, the conversation needs to include planting the seeds for an even bigger opportunity than the one the student might imagine.
For example, at Excelsior we are implementing program and credentialing pathways within and across programs. A student may come to us seeking an associate degree, but we present a clear path to an associate, bachelor’s, master’s and eventually a terminal degree. Esteeming a student’s choice to pursue a higher education credential can lead to an inspiring conversation with a student about a higher version of themselves with a clear roadmap to get there.
Evo: What are some innovations or trends you expect to see across higher ed in the coming years?
CC: Partnerships, consolidation, strategic affiliations and more integrated models of creating opportunities for students will continue to emerge. At Excelsior, for example, our vision is to create an ecosystem of opportunities for students through partnerships with other colleges and universities, employers and communities. This vision of an interinstitutional ecosystem is one that can remove barriers for students and create opportunities to seamlessly move and adapt from college to career to community service and back again.
For example, one of the barriers adult students face is maximizing transfer credit portability. An adult student at one institution might have earned most of the credits, say 45 of 60 credits, toward a master’s degree. A new job opportunity may offer the student the chance to improve their economic circumstances, but only if they move to a different state. Applying to another institution, however, can mean that only nine credits will transfer. The need to repeat, start over, add to mounting debt and delay completion becomes a barrier for the student. At Excelsior, we will design our vision of a constellation that includes preset agreements of varying types to facilitate more transfer credit and better support, including job opportunities that can accelerate the social adult students’ economic mobility.
Adding new business models is another trend that will continue. Hybrid, hi-flex, competency-based and integrated continuing education models will continue to proliferate. Subscription pricing, incentivizing completion and better models of holistic student support will emerge. Each generation is more tech-savvy than the one before it. Experimenting with new technologies and paying attention to innovation in the edtech market will become table stakes for thriving colleges and universities.
Customization will also continue. Meeting students where they are and bringing learning to students is part of the future. In most institutions, students are expected to restructure their lives to be ready to learn when faculty are ready to teach. In a modern experience, like online education, teaching can occur when the student is ready to learn. In asynchronous models, for example, students can study and learn late at night, early in the morning or whenever it fits into their lives as opposed to having to adjust to more traditional in-person university class schedules. When students can meet in person, it will be for intensive learning experiences that involve immersion into complex problems, solved in teams, that are evaluated by more authentic assessment. AI models as an augmentation rather than a replacement for great teaching and learning will also continue to evolve.
At the same time, faculty roles are also likely to change. As more adaptive learning and competency-based models of teaching and learning continue to grow, faculty will begin to specialize in different teaching methods and modalities rather than try to be good at everything. Those who are great at face-to-face education will teach in that model. Others who are great at technology-enabled and distance education will specialize in that area. The goal is to ensure students have access to the best teaching experiences and more importantly the ones that best fit their learning styles. Both in-person and technology-enabled teaching and learning are important.
Evo: Is there anything you would like to add?
CC: It’s critical that we restore our optimism, redefine the purpose and clarify the value of higher education for future generations. We still know that a bachelor’s degree can add a million dollars of lifetime income to someone’s economic well-being and that a master’s and perhaps a doctorate can add even more economic and social mobility.
While I have talked a lot about technology, industry trends and other topics, I am genuinely concerned that we are losing sight of the importance of the liberal arts and general education. It is no secret that our country has become more polarized, and decision-making is based on passion rather than reason. From an academic perspective, our current focus on jobs, skills, careers and credentials is happening at the expense of graduating people who can think critically.
Universities were once a place where people of different ideas could come together and disagree without shutting down an important conversation and dialogue. This does not mean that disagreements have not been heated or emotional. It does mean, however, that we are creating campus environments that are choosing silence over the need to disagree, debate and remain respectful or at least tolerant of different ideas. Our capacity to hold two different points of view in our minds and still work together from a place of common ground is disappearing.
The liberal arts are the place where many students learn about topics such as history, art, culture, literature, philosophy and religion among other essential areas of thought and perspective. The current social and political situation may reflect the perception that a liberal arts education is of little value because it does not translate directly into a job. The challenge for us all is not to choose sides but to create new educational solutions and opportunities where both the best of a liberal arts education and finding a good job are equally important.
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