Tuesday, June 14, 2022 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
Micromanagement of our colleges and universities by the Nevada State Board of Regents has been well documented in Las Vegas Sun editorials and elsewhere. Less apparent are the costs of valuing management over visionary leadership. Higher education leaders must question assumptions and be open to change as seismic shifts in education occur. If they don’t, our schools may miss opportunities and our students may be harmed.
To prepare Nevada college graduates to be competitive in the world of tomorrow, we must change, and so must the leadership of the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) and Board of Regents. This election season gives us that opportunity.
To their credit, our colleges and universities have made progress in identifying and rethinking some of the hidden assumptions in higher education.
The internet has put more information at our fingertips, and the rapid pace of discovery has given some factual knowledge a short shelf life.
In response, we have slowly moved away from the hyper-specialization and “regurgitation” mode of education. This has, in turn, created space for developing critical thinking skills and “soft skills” that have a longer shelf life and often, more practical applications. A fringe benefit is that understanding these skills requires commitment beyond “cramming for the exam,” a practice that tends to cheapen undergraduate degrees.
We have also started to promote interdisciplinary studies that go beyond single academic subjects and combine to cultivate new skills and support practical problem solving.
Additionally, some colleges now recognize that multiple changes of profession are the new norm. With rapid changes in technology and society, the linear lifestyle or “assembly line model” of education that prepares students for a single lifelong career is less common. Instead, a more cyclical or “revolving door” pattern is emerging between continuing education, multiple careers and periods of semi-retirement. (The assembly line is still echoed in health care, judicial and correctional systems, but that is a topic for another day.)
As if these changes were not enough, other seismic shifts in education are already in progress and will require visionary transformational leadership. For example:
New sources of learning and accreditation, including nongovernmental organizations, industry, credit-banking programs, and open online course content, are partnering with, and in some cases challenging, the dominant role of colleges and universities. The role of community colleges is also expanding, reducing costs when compared with traditional four-year colleges and in some cases offering more innovative, engaging and hands-on learning opportunities.
Together, these shifts will cut into the enrollment and tuition bases of traditional universities.
There is also an increasing demand for “right brain skills,” including subjective thinking, inductive reasoning, nonlinear thinking (beyond trend analysis), improved anticipation of events commonly missed (“wild cards”) and of unintended consequences of policy decisions, and imagination.
In addition to these seismic shifts, there is a growing need to prepare students for professions and careers that may not yet exist. Institutions of higher learning that fail to predict the future will lose relevance as they continue preparing their students for “the world that was.”
Finally, spiraling college costs and student debt and declining upward mobility require students, teachers, administrators and parents to rethink sustainable learning outcomes and funding models.
Current models of higher education are woefully inadequate in this era of rapid change and these seismic shifts are likely to upend higher education as we know it. To prepare college graduates for the world of tomorrow and catapult Nevada into national prominence as a leader in higher education, we need visionary regents who ask tough questions.
Election season is our opportunity to elect such regents and send the micromanagers and tinker-at-the-margins managers packing. The NSHE and Nevada Board of Regents are no place to be “majoring in the minors.”
David Stein is a Las Vegas resident, former adjunct professor of physic at Chapman College and advisory board member to the Institute for the Future at Anne Arundel Community College in Annapolis, Md.
