The Changing World of Higher Education
“If anything is certain, it is that change is certain. The world we
are planning for today will not exist in this form tomorrow.
”
~ Philip Crosby, Quality Innovator
Did you know?
By 2015, artificial intelligence, data mining, and virtual reality will help most companies and government agencies to assimilate data and solve problems beyond the range of today’s computers.
New technologies often require a higher level of education and training to use them effectively.
More than half of American scientists and engineers are nearing retirement.
The number of U.S. bachelor’s degrees awarded in engineering in 2005 was nearly 15% below the peak 20 years ago. The United States needs 114,000 engineering graduates each year, but graduate only 65,000.
The Bureau of Labor predicts that the number of job openings in science and engineering will grow by 47% in the five years ending in 2010.
The design and marketing cycle – idea, invention, innovation, imitation – is shrinking steadily.
Brand names associated with quality are becoming even more important in this highly competitive environment.
Podcasting – recording college lectures, news stories, business reports, and the like allows users to listen at their convenience.
Of roughly 240 high-growth job categories identified by the U.S. Bureau of Statistics, 86 require a college degree, while 70 more require at least some college education.
The half-life of an engineer’s knowledge today is only five years; in 10 years 90% of what an engineer knows will be available on a computer. In electronics, fully half of what a student learns as a freshman is obsolete by his senior year.
MIT has put its entire curriculum on the Internet, including class notes, many texts, and sometimes videos of classroom lectures. Other institutions are following suit.
All content on this page can be found in the May/June 2008 issue of The Futurist “Trends Shaping Tomorrow’s World” (Cetron and Davies, 2008, p. 35).