5(ish) Significant Isues in Higher Education

Group 4 identified several areas/themes that we believe will be major issues facing higher education in the next ten years.

Special Populations
We identified several special populations that are currently, or are projected to experience growth in the coming years. Returning Veterans, students with disabilities and autistic spectrum disorders were among the groups identified. We believe that current systems are ill-equipped to truly serve these populations without additional cross-training for staff.

Legislation/Accountability
Gainful Employment, current Colorado legislation concerning performance funding, and increased federal audits of existing legislation and compliance (Title IX, Clery, etc.) and the unknowns about lurking accountability reform raised our blood pressure. We believe that we must become better aware of our current requirements and begin defining accountability for our own industry as opposed to having it defined for us.

Academic Preparedness
The issue of remedial education and the growing demand for community colleges to provide it lead us to believe that serious dialogue and partnership is needed with our colleagues in K-12 education to better prepare incoming college students. The high percentage of students entering the community college in need of remediation is unsustainable given resources and the current and increasing pressure for completion.

Mental Health
In many ways mental health has long been considered and approached as a special population. Increased access to higher education as a result of changes to ADA, and higher number of students graduating from high school with mental health concerns has pushed this into a more general concern. We must increase awareness, cross training and resources to better serve this growing population and avoid potentially negative outcomes in terms of persistence and/or crisis.

Pipeline/Completion/Accountability
While this issue fits within the legislative and accountability concern we also believe it worthy of its own slot in our Top Five. Higher education does a poor job of collaborating and measuring success and completion. While it may be possible to use the clearinghouse and institutional data to measure completion rates we rarely do this effectively. Increased collaboration with K-12 and within Higher Education are needed to create better ways of measuring our success. These collaborations must leverage current and create new technologies that allow us to truly measure and report graduation rates and success.

All of these crises share a certain level of uncertainty and urgency. The answers are not clear and known, nor are the true implications of not adequately finding those answers.