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2030: How Today's Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything by Mauro F. Guillen
Published in August of 2020.
There seems to be general agreement within out community that the pandemic is radically shortening the space in which colleges and universities have to prepare for five concerning developments. These trends include:
- The demographic drop-off.
- The further erosion of public postsecondary funding.
- New competitors, including non-degree online and low-cost scaled degree programs.
- Increasing costs from healthcare, an aging academic workforce, and an unchecked "cost disease."
- Ever-rising levels of societal inequality, wealth concentration, and a hollowed-out middle class.
COVID-19, the thinking goes, will make all these challenges come both bigger and sooner. How might we prepare? Reading and talking about 2030: How Today's Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything might be a good place to start.
2030 makes an excellent companion book to Bryan Alexander's Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education and David Staley's Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education. From a higher ed lens, some of the significant trends that Guillen - a professor at Wharton - discusses are eye-opening. For instance, by 2030, women will control 55 percent of all wealth. This trend is partly a function of rising incomes among women and a result of women, on average outliving men.
What does this mean for higher ed?
How much of the alumni and development outreach at universities is devoted to speaking to women's concerns and aspirations?
If grandparents will be a significant source of tuition funding for future generations, should colleges have a game plan to develop and maintain relationships with this group?
The demographic trends discussed in 2030 are ones that we in higher ed should be paying close attention. The drop-off of traditional college-age cohort (particularly in the Northeast and Midwest) over the next few years may be the least of our worries.
Within a decade, there will be 350 million more people aged 60+ globally than millennials. (The generation born between 1980-1999). This gray revolution may be exacerbated if the US shifts to a fertility regime that resembles Japan, South Korea, or Italy.
One effect of COVID-19 may be a precipitous drop-off in babies. As Guillen points out, people tend not to start families in times of great uncertainty. Colleges and universities may have to plan for a future of permanent scarcity in the traditional college-age population. Offering campus housing and courses for seniors may shift from an innovative approach at the margins of institutional priorities to a core strategy for institutional survival.
Another focus of 2030 that should catalyze discussion across higher ed is the projections about Africa. Between now and the end of the decade, there will be more than 450 million new Africans. In the decades to come, a larger and larger proportion of postsecondary demand will come from Africa.
What are US colleges doing now to prepare for this African opportunity?
How many satellite campuses in Africa are US school opening?
How much work into institutional brand building is going on in Africa?
As Guillen argues, Africa will not only grow rapidly in population but also in wealth. Where the middle class is in decline in the US and much of Europe, Africa's economic trends are likely to be (on balance) positive.
Just as Africa leapfrogged the West in banking (mobile payments) and telecommunications (mobile phones), Africa may skip the campus-based postsecondary build-out and go right to online (mobile) higher education.
Will US colleges and universities be ready to take advantage of the African 21st century?
2030 should inspire terrific discussion among those thinking about the future of higher education. Reading a book on the future that is not about higher ed will help us think laterally - the methodology that Guillen employs and recommends - about academia's future.
What are you reading?
