Last fall I read The Great Upheaval: Higher education’s past, present, and uncertain future. It was an incredible read that synthesized many patterns, signals, and trends that have been surfacing in higher education in recent years. It’s just the latest in a series of books and articles with titles like Higher education at the crossroads of disruption and College disrupted: The great unbundling of higher education. These titles don’t even include the growing body of literature with titles like Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education or The Looming Higher Ed Cliff that feed newspaper articles like SUNY enrollment shrinks again and opinion pieces like For SUNY system, bigger isn’t always better.
Indeed, it doesn’t take much effort to sense that, in the lyrics of Buffalo Springfield, “…there’s something happening here…” but what it is, is actually clear — colleges and universities across the country, and particularly in the Northeast, will undergo significant disruption to the point that those institutions that remain 10 years from now, including MVCC, will look very different than they do today.
Did you notice that I failed to mention the advancement of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) platforms like Google’s Bard? Similar to musicians and comedians who honed their craft in small clubs before hitting the bigtime, AI technology has been toiling in various laboratories for the past decade and has now burst into the public eye as instant disruptions and are developing at lightning speed. Additionally, the most interesting series of articles and research studies explores the decline in the interest high school graduates have in pursuing a traditional four-year college path and questioning the value of a four-year degree. The Demographic Drought our country is experiencing has created a labor shortage in nearly every industry that has helped increase wages and is making shorter educational pathways into good-paying jobs more attractive.
New York has the highest concentration of private four-year colleges and universities in addition to the largest single public system of higher education in SUNY, which has 64 institutions — 34 four-year colleges and 30 community colleges — serving students outside the CUNY system in New York City with its 25 colleges and universities. All this higher education infrastructure is in a state that has lost enough residents through out-migration in the last decade to exceed the current population of North and South Dakota combined. Couple that population decline with declining birthrates, and it spells C-H-A-N-G-E. Graduation season next month will be the last for our neighbors at Cazenovia College, and it’s hard to absorb the reality that its closure is simply a signal of a much larger pattern that we’ll all have to digest as it continues over the next decade.
Fortunately, MVCC has been monitoring these trends and disruptions for years now and has honed its financial operations to become the most efficient college in the SUNY system (measured by budget/credit enrollment=cost per/FTE); reimagined its outreach strategy to now serve the third poorest student population (as measured by Federal Pell Grant eligibility); and transformed the student experience to have the third-highest three-year graduation rate with 76% of all students graduating, transferring, or dropping to part-time status and are still enrolled within six years of originally enrolling.
So, what can any of us do in light of these unprecedented circumstances? Do individual actions even matter when the problems exist within macro-level systems? Yes, individual actions and attitudes will be the cornerstone of our sustained success. Each of us needs to be willing to adopt new ideas, and to do so founded in the cultural values that we have come to embrace. We need to collaborate — not just within our departments and divisions, but across all lines. We need to work to be partners with K-12 and industry in ways we have not previously seen. This can be frightening. Processes change, work changes, our roles adjust, but in the end, it will be our collective efforts at adaptability that will strengthen the organizational position. We must reach across internal lines and collaborate cross-divisionally. We must seek to understand and find a way to “yes.” That is how we will survive as an institution, and how we will continue to serve our students and our community in the future.
If you have any questions or comments, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.
