Covid-19 Accelerates 3 Disruptive Trends Facing Higher Education – Forbes
Yesterday, the Higher Education & Workforce Investment Subcommittee met to examine the impact of Covid-19 on the future of higher education. The subcommittee is right to contemplate the impact of the pandemic on higher education’s future, and I was honored to contribute to that discussion.
The key message I gave to Congress, via WebEx: Don’t fight the future, embrace it! We need a regulatory framework that can meet the challenges of this moment and the future that follows it, that is designed for the technological age, and that can fundamentally modernize our approach to investing in and unlocking the potential of every individual.
Covid-19 was not built into any student’s plans nor any institution’s strategies for 2020. It represents an immediate crisis for higher education, creating challenges for enrolled students and traditional institutions. But Covid-19 raises strategic questions that go far beyond planning for the fall. Covid-19 will leave a lasting imprint on the higher education sector; we will never “go back to normal” as we knew it, pre-pandemic.
But if we seize the opportunity this moment presents, that will be a good thing.