The Future of American Higher Education
By Anthony P. Carnevale
The suffering of the COVID crisis has hung over our lives for more than a year now. Beyond the staggering death toll, we can all bear witness to the sad fact that COVID is a shock to the postsecondary education and training system. In addition to fundamentally changing the way we live, work, and learn, it will result in long-term economic scarring of both individual students and postsecondary institutions in America.
But what comes next for postsecondary education? My sense is that COVID is just the beginning. As the pandemic subsides, it will open the way to demographic, economic, and policy changes that were already gaining momentum.
Much of what I have to say about the future of postsecondary education and its role in the economy starts with two facts.
First, since the 1980s, postsecondary education and training has become the most well-traveled pathway to economic and social success. The short version of the story goes like this: in the 1970s, no more than a high school diploma was required for two-thirds of jobs. Nowadays, more than two-thirds of jobs require at least some postsecondary education or training.
The second fact is more troubling. Because of its new prominence in American economic life, higher education has also become the capstone in an education system that is a primary cause of the reproduction of race and class privilege across generations.
The glass is either 70 percent empty or 30 percent full, depending on how you look at it. Our research shows that a child from a low-income family who has top test scores in kindergarten has a 31 percent chance of graduating from a four-year college and getting a good job by age 25. That’s the good news. The bad news is that a child with low test scores in grade school who comes from a family in the top income quartile has a 71 percent chance of doing the same.
Simply put: today’s postsecondary education and training system has become a new gearwheel, arguably the biggest gearwheel, in the American race and class inequality machine. Postsecondary education and training mimics and magnifies the inequality that it inherits from the pre-K–12 system. It then projects this inequality into labor markets, housing markets, and local school districts, guaranteeing the intergenerational transmission of race and class privilege.
The available evidence suggests that these two trends — the growing value of postsecondary education and its role in replicating race and class privilege — will continue and likely strengthen in the coming years. With those two facts as the backdrop, here is how I see demographics, technological advancement, and major policy proposals impacting higher education:
The first relatively stable card in the higher education deck is that the economic recovery between now and 2030 will only increase demand for postsecondary education. Nationally, we project about 70 percent of jobs in 2030 will require some postsecondary education. Good jobs will continue to be concentrated among workers with postsecondary education.
Another relatively predictable trend is the looming college enrollment decline among traditional-age students. The declining college-age population will lead to declining enrollments and graduations at non-selective colleges in particular. The growth in families with two parents with bachelor’s degrees will increase the size of applicant pools for selective colleges, while the number of applicants to non-selective colleges will shrink.
The effect of changing technology on jobs is somewhat less predictable. Looking back, technology has not slowed job growth in America. For example, there were around 100 million jobs when the new computer-based technology arrived in force in the 1980s. Before the last recession, the number of American jobs had grown to more than 150 million.
For the most part, technology doesn’t eliminate jobs so much as it changes tasks and activities within jobs. On average, 28 percent of tasks within all occupations are at risk of automation. Overall, our projections show job losses due to technology will be between 8 and 12 percent. In general, technology is good news for those with postsecondary education and bad news for those with no more than a high school diploma. At the same time, labor force growth is sputtering in America, a trend that will intensify in the coming decades. This growing decline in available labor may change the balance of power between workers and their employers.
My sense is that all of these demographic, economic, technology, and policy changes are relatively predictable. The wild cards are the shift toward free community college at the federal and state levels and the potential federal infrastructure jobs program bill, which will create millions of jobs, at least in the short term.
The extent to which accountability will penetrate higher education itself is unclear. Technology has been the signature element in the transformation of our economy since the 1980s, increasing productivity and accountability. Higher education has been one of the few industries where this has not happened yet. But networked systems driven by outcome standards will inevitably come in higher education.
The movement toward economic transparency and accountability is gradually shifting from the degree level toward the program level as well. We will almost surely end up with more transparency and accountability on completion, employment, and earnings for all postsecondary programs. We may also get some form of employment and earnings regulatory standards to go with an expansion in public support for certificates and short-term training programs and even some non-credit programs.
The movement toward transparency in labor market outcomes and graduation rates at the program level are the leading edge of that shift. Public higher education systems are much easier to reorganize across institutions at the program level because they include multiple institutions. Stand-alone private colleges are hard to reorganize: they essentially offer a relatively high-priced cafeteria model of postsecondary programs. As a result, they are limited in their ability to restructure with off-site programs, especially across multiple institutions.
With these trends in mind, I’m envisioning the postsecondary education and training system of the future: one that is less fragmented, more responsive to consumers, and better serves our local economies.
To get there, we need to break down the barriers between the siloed middle school, high school, and training and postsecondary systems, as well as between education and labor markets. These structural changes must begin with career counseling, occupational exposure in middle school, internships and work-based learning in high school and, ideally, internships that match the field of study in the postsecondary education and training system.
At the same time, we need to be sure that these new programs that break down institutional barriers don’t become a new form of tracking into less prestigious and lucrative fields by race, class, and gender. Tracking by institution and field of study has already gone too far within postsecondary education.
Our education and training system is becoming more closely intertwined with the economy, not less. Continuing to bridge the gaps between education, training, and work is essential to the recovery from the COVID recession and the future of our higher education system and the economy.
Dr. Carnevale is director and research professor at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. CEW is an independent, nonprofit research and policy institute affiliated with the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy that studies the links among education, career qualifications, and workforce demands.
Thanks to Martin Van Der Werf, Hilary Strahota, and Emma Wenzinger for editorial feedback; Johnna Guillerman for graphic design; and Frank Zhang for figure design.
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