By Eric Bing & Marie Cini
By now, it should be clear that we’re not going back to February. COVID-19 has changed higher education irrevocably. The way Americans expect to learn, the demands on their time and energy, and the job market students will graduate into are forever altered.
Prior to COVID-19, colleges and universities were already struggling to meet the needs of many of today’s students — of whom nearly two-thirds work, half are financially independent, and a quarter are raising children themselves. These students often cannot afford to go to college full time and balance school with a patchwork of jobs on their path to a degree. Most likely, the demographics of postsecondary education will continue to skew toward part-time post-traditional learners as recently laid-off workers look to gain new skills in order to re-enter the workforce. With good reason, workers without degrees are among the first fired in a recession, and few good jobs go to workers without at least some college, during periods of growth and recovery.
Institutions can’t change overnight to meet this need. But the abrupt and nearly total shift to online education—while certainly not ideal from a learning standpoint—has demonstrated that colleges and universities can move far quicker than they thought.