Education is seen as a pathway to a better future. First was universal access to primary education, then to secondary education, followed by tremendous growth in community college access. New segments of the population have sought access to baccalaureate and graduate degrees. Increasingly, those who have been underserved in higher education are demanding access.

Shifting demographics are driving change. Those coming to campuses today represent greater ethnic and racial diversity, as well as language diversity, than ever before. More students with special needs are finding their way to our doors. As the population ages, traditional 18- to 22-year-olds are finding their classroom peers to be older with varied life experiences. A greater percentage of students are juggling jobs, family, and life obligations while attending college. Many do not live on campus, and may live some distance away.

Like our K-12 colleagues, we must adapt to meet the needs of our student population. Understanding different ways of learning, attending to cultural context and meaning, appreciating the life situations of our students, promoting tolerance and embracing diversity are all important. The models that worked for delivering programs to homogenous, on-campus, resident populations of just-out-of-high-school students are not models that will work with this population.

ALTERNATIVE MODELS

The changing population is driving demands for alternative models of education, but so is rapidly changing technology. An increasing percentage of students are coming to college expecting technology to be part of their world. They use cell phones, PDAs, iPods, laptops, and more. They e-mail, instant message, blog and text. They know about wikis, podcasts, MySpace, YouTube and Second Life. Increasingly, digital natives are showing up on our campuses, mixing with peers and faculty who are digital immigrants.

Students are asking for us to do business differently. The Monday-Wednesday-Friday one-hour face-to-face class on campus is increasingly not what students want. They are asking for delivery of programs on their time (not ours), at locations convenient to them (not us), using media-rich materials (not lectures) that allow for personalization and customization (differentiated curriculum and assignments based on the learner). They want credit not based on seat time, but demonstration of competencies, forcing us to reexamine how we structure and deliver academic programs, how we craft curriculum, how we design instructional experiences, and how we assess learning.

In teacher education, these demands have changed our landscape. We are delivering programs in the field (in schools), using technologies to provide access for students remote from campus, moving to modular curriculum, and offering time-compressed, evening-only and summer-only options. We also are working collaboratively with alternative providers outside of higher education.

ARTICULATION AND ALIGNMENT

The demand to address issues of portability, articulation, and transitions is mounting.

As students become more geographically mobile, they are asking to move credits from institution to institution. They want community college credits accepted at the four-year institutions. Students want to combine courses across multiple institutions to create degrees. In addition, there are demands for greater alignment between high school exit criteria and college entrance criteria. Having such alignment should reduce the needs for remediation and enhance the ability of students to enter and succeed in higher education.

The P-20 initiative has been working to address these issues, but more needs to be done. We are striving to create better articulation agreements for courses and entire programs. Working together we can help students be successful, reduce the time to degrees, and use our combined resources more wisely.

AFFORDABILITY

Using our resources more wisely is important when our constituents are demanding not only access, but affordability. There is a perception that we in higher education have not used resources as efficiently as we might, and that the costs of tuition, books, and fees are too high for students to bear. We are being asked to streamline our programs, create more efficient processes, consider workload and provide more financial support to students. In the future our processes and our budgets must become more transparent.

Several of these issues are addressed in the latest version of the Higher Education Opportunity Act, which includes sections related to student aid, online tuition calculators, databases to compare institutions, control of textbook costs, and state maintenance of efforts to fund higher education or face sanctions. But at a more basic level, we must be more cognizant of the perceptions of our actions. In other words, when we make decisions about how to expend resources, we should weigh the consequences of public perception.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND ASSESSMENT

There is increasing demand for "value added" accountability models; for higher education to become accountable for the outcomes of our efforts. We see a seismic shift in expectations for public accountability and use of assessments. These demands are creating tension in higher education as our entire culture must reexamine not only how we do our work, but our very relationship with students and the public. Driven by federal and state mandates and the increasing focus on outcomes (rather than inputs) from accrediting bodies, the work of faculty and staff is dramatically changed.

Colleges of education have been on the forefront, facing public reporting of data on teacher preparation (required in federal legislation) as well as strident calls from professional associations and national accrediting bodies.

We have been required to focus our attention on what we want students to know and be able to do, and to articulate what data we will collect and what criteria we will use to determine our success. This is a shift in responsibility orientation. We are asked to hold ourselves accountable for student learning outcomes.

AGILE AND ADAPTABLE

If we are to survive and thrive in an increasingly complex and diverse world, higher education must be agile and adaptable. Historically, we have not been good at this. The future will require creativity and the ability to cope with rapid change and the unknown. It will require us to be responsive to external as well as internal demands. It will require that we all work together to ensure high-quality higher education for future generations.