Higher Education:
Emerging Directions and Emerging Needs
By Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D. • James White

The decision to establish a collaborative training program linking the Center of Excellence in Disaster Management & Humanitarian Assistance and the graduate programs of the University of Hawai‘i raised provocative questions about emerging directions and needs in higher education overall. Everyone in higher education today—students, faculty, administrators—can see that massive social and technological changes are altering the content and process of higher education, but the educational enterprise is failing to address the consequences of those changes. Major social problems such as population growth, environmental degradation, low-intensity wars, widespread poverty, international crime and violence are part of our daily awareness, and the challenges they present are magnified by the forces of telecommunications, globalization, transnational economic activity, and Westernization. Education—the process by which societies generate and transmit knowledge across generations to promote adjustment and adaptation to societal norms and expectations—is beginning to respond. Here are two comparative lists to assist in understanding the changes occurring in higher education today. They are beneficial to ponder when designing educational programs and materials for humanitarian responders across civilian and military sectors.

Emerging Directions

Technology: Technology has invaded the classroom, the laboratory, and the homes of people around the world through the widespread use of computers. This has given rise to countless ways of accessing information, data, and knowledge that historically has been limited to the privileged few. Word processing, graphical displays, data analysis, e-mail, chat rooms, dedicated web sites, computerized instruction—all are now commonplace and have transformed the content and process of education.

Lifelong Learning: Lifelong learning—the promotion of learning across the entire human lifespan—has become a popular educational goal of universities and colleges. Not only are students being taught to prepare for a lifetime of learning and interest development, campuses are becoming places where retirees and older graduates can be found in classrooms sitting side by side with twenty-somethings.

Distance Education: The concept of “Distance Education” is not new, but it has been given fresh meaning by the extraordinary growth of the Internet. Now that individuals around the world can be in instantaneous contact with one another, offering and receiving courses and training from distant locations is no longer a technological challenge. While in the comfort of their home or out in the field, students can receive instruction from the most brilliant and knowledgeable teachers the world has to offer. Just how far this trend might go was illustrated recently by the announcement that billionaire Michael Saylor was investing heavily in a new top-quality online university, specifically intended to take away from universities their “control of knowledge.”

Active Learning, Interaction, and Participation: Because technology makes it possible, and because attitudes about student roles are changing, there is far greater student interaction in the educational process. The new approach to the classroom is “active learning,” involving student participation in the course goals, methods, and content. This helps create an educational milieu that encourages taking responsibility for one’s own education.

Partnerships: The increasing importance of education has led to greater involvement of different societal sectors in the educational process, as well. Today one finds partnerships being formed between diverse community sectors such as business, government, and the military, in addition to the traditional academic sector. There are collaborative efforts between chambers of commerce and school systems, universities and human service community agencies, and corporations and schools. These emerging partnerships reflect widespread concern about education and the recognition that education is too important to leave to schools and universities alone.

Certification: The range of new technical skills that are demanded by our changing society has created an increased and new emphasis on the need for certification. In the past, a university degree represented the benchmark of knowledge and skill, but now it has become popular for different institutions and organizations to offer specialized certification for specific topics and/or skills. Thus, business groups, training agencies, universities, and even governments now offer short-term certificate-based training and education to indicate that a particular performance level has been achieved.

Privatization: Much as it has in the business world, privatization has emerged as a major force in education, in the form of numerous private training institutes, colleges, and related organizations. The largest educational operation in the United States today, in terms of enrollment, is the University of Phoenix, an institution that was started to provide educational opportunities to individuals who had limited access to traditional schools and universities, and who could acquire credit for life experiences.

Everyone’s a Teacher, Everyone’s a Student: The telecommunications revolution has made information, knowledge, and perhaps even wisdom available to people of all ages and walks of life throughout the world. The traditional roles of student and teacher are no longer useful predictors of information, knowledge, and wisdom. Information is power and power is being redistributed, based upon capability, talent, and ability to access and share information from numerous and diverse sources.

Market-Model University: More and more, university priorities and governance are determined by external forces like business, government, and the military, because these direct sizable amounts of money toward creating specific educational products they need. These sectors may also establish their own universities or programs within universities to meet their own specific needs.

Decrease in Humanities Majors: A recent study indicates that the number of bachelor degrees in the humanities (e.g., languages, history, philosophy, etc.) has decreased while those in computer and information sciences have increased. Traditionally a bulwark against rapid and widespread social changes, the liberal arts educational institution is now being challenged to join the shift to training technical and information science graduates.

New Educational Institutions: The traditional college or university, with its campus and students focused on obtaining degrees, is in the process of disappearing. Education experts suggest there are four different educational institutions current and emerging: the traditional college or university; the corporate university that provides on-site training programs for the workforce; the mega-university that is focused on the job market with high-tech teaching methods; and the virtual education institution that uses the internet and telecommunications to reach students around the world.

Service Learning: Volunteerism is merging with academic training. Students are being placed in a community context where they can perform certain service functions in exchange for academic degree credit. For example, students might volunteer time in an agency that renders humanitarian services such as feeding the homeless. The positive aspect of this development is that students not only learn the values of service through volunteerism, they also have the opportunity to apply their college learning in “real-life” situations.

Emerging Needs

Globalization: We live in a global community. Events in distant lands now impact the entire world, with economic, political, military and often moral consequences. Yet little is being done to prepare people to live within a global community, especially toward understanding mutual responsibilities and obligations to one another. It is essential that people be educated about the positive and negative consequences of globalization as they relate to different nations, cultures, and environments. Given that these consequences may ultimately be defined by particular perceptual viewpoints, the need remains for us all to become citizens of the world, and to develop a true global awareness and consciousness.

Values: Higher education must encourage and promote encounters with human values. This can be achieved by including the notion of values in every course, or through a series of specific courses designed to address some of the pressing issues of our time: peace; diversity; social responsibility and citizenship; civility; aesthetics; morality. The point is not to promote particular values, but rather to provide students with the opportunity to understand what values are, how they develop and how they guide individual and societal behavior.

Monitoring Corporate Entry into Education: As public education becomes increasingly dependent upon private corporations for financial support, the tradeoff between such “corporatization” and the “sanctity” of education is becoming an issue, according to Martin Austermuhle writing in the Penn State Daily Collegian. There is a need to monitor, through open communication, both contacts and contracts between the corporate world and academia, to prevent any betrayal of the university’s mission to educate and to serve for the common good.

Vision in University Administrators: At the turn of century, university presidents were an integral part of the university faculty, academic leaders who maintained scholarly leadership and visibility. They frequently taught courses in moral philosophy. Today, university presidents and other higher administration staff function largely within business frameworks; presidents are considered CEOs, and speak the language of the corporate world. They function at a distance from both their faculty and the daily realities of student education and university life. What was very much a part of the past and is missing today, is this mix of intellectual and enlightened leadership with vision. Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, calls for “more administrators who are themselves serious scholars or have been recently serious scholars and who see the university in more than just vocational dollars-and-cents terms…we don’t have many administrators like that.”

Giving Education its Proper Value: In a world in which the commodification of all services, goods, and people has become commonplace, the value of education for its own sake is threatened. A child looks with wonder upon the world and seeks to understand it for the sheer delight of knowing and making sense of things. Children are not guided by the monetary consequences of their actions but rather by an inherent impulse to understand-an impulse that is part of our essential nature. The dignity and social value of knowledge and wisdom, and of education itself-not the degree, not the credential, and not the financial payoff-must be restored.

Educating the Whole Person: The demands being imposed upon us to acquire technical skills, especially computer literacy, are increasing. We must also pay attention to other dimensions and areas of personal and social functioning, including aesthetics, morality, peace, spirituality, civility, physical well-being, and notions of global citizenship. This is no longer a luxury, but a requirement that must be part of our educational effort.

World Citizenship: Half a century ago, the World Federation for Mental Health recognized the potential for world citizenship. In today’s world, in which national identities are being challenged by local and regional loyalties, educating for world citizenship is a real need.

The question must be faced as to whether survival is possible without adapting human institutions so that people can live as world citizens in a world community, in which local loyalties are rendered compatible with a wider allegiance to mankind as a whole.… World citizenship means an informed, reflective, responsible allegiance to mankind as a whole. The movement toward world citizenship is one which…fulfills, rather than goes counter to, the trend of history.

WFMH, 1948. Quoted in Brody, 1987, p.4

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