Along with its persisting global presence and its surging number of victims, COVID-19 has conjured numerous challenges due to its unprecedented nature. Whether we see the vast changes around us as positive or not, we need to adapt to stay in the performance race. Higher education is facing some critical demands, and it might be useful to summarize some gripping ones, along with the ways we’re collectively addressing them.
Enrollment
History has taught us that people return to college when employment challenges and economic uncertainty rise, but COVID-19 has busted this trend. Four-year institutions and community colleges are experiencing a sharp decline in enrollment. While graduate student enrollment yielded a small increase, first year undergraduate populations declined by about 16% at community colleges and 14% at four-year institutions. The reasons for this trend vary from strained finances and travel concerns to aversion about online education.
Learning Formats
While part of the reasons for the current enrollment decline is ascribed to the pandemic-triggered online format, we should expect that a hybrid education format will become the new normal, even at the most conventional institutions. Both students and faculty, who have initially been grappling with the change, have become accustomed to the convenience of teaching and learning from home. The realization that it’s inspiring to be on campus and have spontaneous interactions with faculty and peers is countered by the cost and time efficiency of acquiring education from the comfort of one’s office or home without the stress of commuting or the expense of on-campus dormitories. The writing has been on the wall for quite some time: Online education has been one of the fastest growing trends in recent years, with blended instruction labeled as more effective than strictly face-to-face or online by the US Department of Education, especially for postsecondary students. COVID-19 has converted a learning mode that was previously perceived as substandard into a legitimate, constructive, and most likely lasting format toward acquiring higher education.
Interdisciplinarity
The call for more interdisciplinary approaches has increased in past years, but the reality of silos, fundamentally created to establish departmental and programmatic focus in academia, has kept interfering with the desires for a broader learning span amongst students in higher education. While it is generally understood that the accelerating shifts between jobs and careers warrant greater flexibility within today’s professionals, universities continue to struggle with this contemporary need. One of the biggest impediments lies in the fact that busting silos requires eradication of egos, which is highly counterintuitive to academia. As long as individual departments prioritize and get praised for their singular progress, the general population, most prominently the students, will suffer. COVID-19 is forcing institutions of higher education to implement collaboration where there used to be impenetrable silos. After all, identifying common goals that demand collectively working toward their realization, is the most effective and rewarding way to institutional survival and student satisfaction.
