“Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you sit there” – Will Rogers

Change is difficult for any organization, especially those who celebrate their greatest achievements dressed in medieval garments. The culture of higher education is steeped in tradition, routine, and academic calendars built on two semesters per academic year. Extracurricular activities such as symposiums, athletics, and fine arts have well established and reliable seasons from which they enrich the learning community. At the same time, dwindling sources of funding call for gains in efficiency, which by definition, beg for change.

Gains in efficiency come from specialization and higher education has been on the adoption trend for decades. However, the increase in specialized administrative roles in higher education has brought forth some semblance of siloing, that is, the separation of front line learning by faculty and their student-filled classrooms, and staff, charged with managing the business of education. While specialized roles help institutions gain efficiency, they are several steps removed from the front lines. That separation has a dampening effect on much needed creativity and innovation in the industry today. 

What has changed? Everything.

Generation Z. Most schools are still battling the significant changes brought on by Gen Z’s predecessor, the millennials, yet those pale in comparison. While millennials brought tech savvy with them to classrooms, it is Gen Z who debuted post internet, and they are sometimes referred to as the IGen, a term coined by Jean Twenge, a notable author, researcher, and psychologist.

Millennials value networking, interdependence, and collaboration skills as a means to an end. Gen Z were born into a post 9-11 generation and experienced all the negative effects on families during the great recession, as many witnessed the loss of implied social contracts between banks and homeowners, and workers and their employers. As a result, they are skeptical of authority, including faculty. Gen Z prefers to ‘go fish’ for their information in an age of smartphones, YouTube, and omnipresent internet. They prefer, more so than previous generations, to have a greater hand in constructing their own futures and have a greater say in what they are expected to do with their futures. They are more independent, and demanding, and often perceive their relationship with the college similar to what they do with any other high-value purchase.

Demographics. The number of new high school graduates has been volatile over the past decade, with slightly rising numbers in the West and Southwest, and declining numbers in the Northeast and Midwest, incidentally where the most colleges are located. By 2032, there will be a net decline in traditional college-aged students nationally. Nathan D. Grawe’s new book Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, cites the anticipated decline in these students will be larger than expected due to the Great Recession. Moreover, the current pandemic will not bode well for any educational institutions in the long run. Consolidation is imminent.

Outlook. When we analyze the learning outcomes of students, the segment representing those with the weakest performance overwhelmingly come from low social economic status zip codes. Decades of funding cuts across the nation have resulted in very few zip codes being able to produce college-ready applicants. The vast majority engage in social promotion and produce high school graduates with questionable academic skills.

As a result, there is a nearly limitless opportunity for institutions willing to engage in the messy business of fundamental college prep and college work simultaneously. These prospects are not hard to find, just go to any high school guidance counselor’s office and ask: Do you have any struggling students? These are those who have been left behind, a market with the best prospects of helping the country regain its competitiveness. Transformation Academics is a term I coined to represent the tremendous gap-filling opportunity colleges across America have in front of them. That is the biggest market for traditional-aged college students. You’ll also make a lot of friends on those counselor’s offices.

The largest growing overall market remains the adult learner, those with a few credits who were unable to complete their studies, yet find that a formal education is what is preventing them from reaching their life’s goals. Their numbers exceed 95 million as of 2020 according to calculations from the Lumina Foundation.

Adult students are commonly defined as those over the age of 24 and are often referred to as non-traditional students or adult learners, regardless of their age. The same factors that prevented or interrupted their previous college plans remain: They need flexibility to tend to other life demands, while simultaneously pursuing their degree completion. Structures like on demand courses, blended learning featuring online, hybrid, and face-to-face tutoring are attractive to such students because they know that the demands placed on them by others remain, and they need to be able to successfully balance complicated schedules.

What is increasingly clear to college boards today is that neither country club campuses nor supposed “silver bullet” academic programs will bring in countless enrollments.  It is back to the basics of filling a market need with a valuable product.

Institutions need to revise the delivery systems (everything replicated online 24×7: video, voice, and text), formats (asynchronous, synchronous) and materials (textbooks, simulations, faculty narrations, professional seminars), and foundations such as novel grading schemes (traditional weighted, pass/fail, suspense, competency-based) in order to serve those in more flexible, yet similarly rigorous ways. Each year the professoriate and institutions will gain more competence in balancing flexibility with rigor and find that eliminating the bottlenecks, bureaucracies, and starts and stops will go a long way towards making this batch of more than 95 million non-traditional students successful.

If you would like to craft and implement a market-based strategy and cut through the noise, set up a consultation.