Looking back on last year, higher education appears to have been on a bumpy, roller coaster back seat ride. This assessment comes from a wide range of higher education executives, who collectively express hopes for a better 2018.
“Dizzying,” “disappointing,” “swirling,” “disrupted,” “tumultuous,” “steady” and “evolving” were words chosen to describe America’s higher education experience by those who were interviewed for this article. The descriptions ran across the spectrum, but unanimously fell short of enthusiastic.
Executives say many of higher education’s major issues were headed toward the year’s end unresolved. These range from renewal of the massive federal Higher Education Act, with billions of tax dollars for higher education in limbo, to resolution of federal policy on thousands of undocumented young immigrant students, or ‘dreamers,’ and immigrants under special federal protection (DACA).
The higher education community was stunned by the Department of Education’s plan to hand over the management of its massive billion-dollar student loans program portfolio to one vendor.
The community was also rattled time and time again by the steady shutdown of numerous high-profile for-profit online education institutions. More than a handful of state-controlled and small non-profits also shut their doors. Many for-profits were abandoned by students and investors as they faced complaints from federal funders over delivery of services. Public and small non-profits faced losses of students and supporters, as competition on the provider landscape continued to grow.
The acquisition of Kaplan University, the major online education vendor, by Indiana’s Purdue University, a long-established traditional education institution, was seen as a wake-up call to the rest of the community about the emergence of a major recasting of players in the education vendors orbit, some say.
The growing movement to get states to embrace education ‘attainment goals’ continued to gain support this year, although the consistency of policies is at issue. Today, some 40 states have codified some measures of education attainment goals, according to several industry studies. As the attainment goals drive continued, it competed with a growing debate over what organizations should be recognized for accreditation standards and what programs should be recognized and at what levels of achievement.
