You Won’t See These on College Campuses After COVID
Higher education has just been jolted into a more accessible and productive post-COVID world. Colleges and universities are changing during COVID.
Strategic college leaders are accelerating changes to not only survive, but thrive. Plans that were scheduled over months and years are now fast-tracked.
On the other hand, tactical leaders are still reacting to daily challenges until they can get “back to normal”. Some call that the ostrich syndrome.
There is no such thing as “back to normal”. The new normal is being created with each decision made during the pandemic.
There is the good news. Many of these changes will make higher education more relevant, affordable, and accessible in the long run.
What you won’t see in a post-COVID future:
Lines. Standing in line for a professor to show up for office hours, for an academic advisor, and for answers about financial aid and transcripts will no longer waste students’ precious time. Because this was not possible during COVID, meeting invites, short video chats, and phone calls have taken the place of lines. Workflows that needed automating have been, or soon will be.
New construction. Remote work has not only become acceptable, efficiencies have been found. This means fewer office spaces. More courses will meet less often as digital class support increases. The appetite for shiny new buildings will be replaced with an appetite for better technology and digital infrastructure. Fundraising will follow suit.
Rigid class schedules. Students who want to combine career and education or work their way through college will no longer have to make a choice between missing class and missing a critical work meeting, or delaying taking a critical class by a semester because its meeting time conflicts with their work schedule. All classes will be offered in all modalities — face-to-face, remote, hybrid (combination of online remote and reduced face-to-face meetings). Students will be able to choose the modality to meet their learning needs and their schedule.
Hard-to-get academic help. Tutoring centers and help desks that operate between 9–5 and require physical presence make it hard to get help when it is needed the most — at that precious maximum learning moment. COVID has taught us how to serve more students better. Physical centers will still exist for drop-in, but the same tutors will also be available online with hours that fit the need. Emerging systems will massively expand help by connecting students that have mastered the class to students that want tutoring or have a question. This opens the door to more access and, therefore, more success.
Large lecture halls. The large lecture hall with hundreds of students, little to no interaction with the professor, and with classes scheduled back-to-back evolved for efficiency — not learning. We have learned we don’t need these spaces, that they may not be safe for some time, and that they are not great learning environments. Large lectures will finally be replaced by well-produced content from the same professor, and designed by professionals for learning. The lecture hall will be repurposed to collaborative learning space and used for hybrid classes that meet less frequently, with fewer students per meeting, allowing more interaction with the professor.
Endless faculty meetings. COVID has taught us what is necessary, and what was habit. Wasting faculty time sitting in a meeting that has no clear outcome will be replaced with online polling, quick video chat check-ins, and collaborative, remote document writing. All these were available pre-COVID, but there was social pressure to attend meetings that doesn’t exist now and shouldn’t come back.
Low enrollment majors with few job prospects. Much like what happened after the 2008 recession, majors costing more to teach than the demand will be shut down. Instead of bragging about having 250 majors, universities will become more focused and differentiated — based on the strengths of their regional economy and their strongest programs. Regional, small and mid-sized, comprehensive universities will be challenged to survive as major universities begin offering their strongest, specialized programs remotely.
WIFI dead zones. WIFI will be pervasive. Campuses will make sure their parking lots, outdoor spaces, and other areas are covered. They will work with towns to ensure neighborhoods close to campus are covered. Some colleges (especially community colleges) will partner with local telecom’s to ensure that every student has WIFI turned on at their home as a part of their typical registration and fees.
Division II and III athletics. Every athletic program is being evaluated for the benefits to the university and student athletes for the cost. More small colleges will convert scholarship athletics to club sports redirecting the savings to broader scholarships.
Every crisis teaches us something as a society and a culture. Will academic culture adapt to what COVID taught us or will we slip back into the same old habits that were inefficient and wasted time?
As an impatient optimist, I believe higher education has just been jolted into a more accessible and productive post-COVID world.
Dale Whittaker is a Senior Program Officer in Postsecondary Success at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A former executive at several of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing public research universities, he now works with other rapidly growing institutions with national and global footprints to help them innovate at scale to provide more degrees for more people with greater equity.
