More questions than answers: Planning for a post-pandemic future

The challenges we have faced in the past seven weeks have been enormous, but we have risen to meet them in ways that are nothing short of inspiring.

We have transitioned—in almost no time—with deliberate focus and determination from organizations built largely around face-to-face (even crowd-based) practices, to ones that operate remotely.

We did this to ensure that our students continue making progress towards their credentials, while at the same time, securing the health and safety of our communities in the midst of an unprecedented global pandemic.

And we have done so much more in assisting our communities and our Commonwealth in countless ways—whether through the production and donation of personal protective equipment (PPE), the establishment of surge-hospital space within our facilities, or the provision of broadband wi-fi to local residents who need it, and so much more.

We have a great deal of which to be proud, a great deal to celebrate. So let’s take a moment to:

• Acknowledge what we have accomplished—what we can accomplish when we work together.
• Honor and say thank you to the countless and otherwise ordinary people across this great nation who, day after day, become heroes “through extraordinary and selfless actions to help their neighbors” (Sylvia Mathews Burwell).
• Pray for those who are sick and the families of those who have passed, often alone and apart from their loved ones.
• Breathe, draw courage, and master our resolve so that we may look forward together and confront our future.

As we do these things and reflect on the changing landscape of higher education, I offer the following observations that may inform our thinking:

Affordable, career-relevant higher education is probably more important now than ever before in the history of this country. 

It continues as an engine of economic development—ensuring employers have access to the skilled workforce they need—and a driver of social mobility as the most reliable pathway into and beyond the middle class.

Higher education will also, almost certainly, take on new roles such as reskilling and upskilling those who are un- and under-employed for whom we must create educational pathways. From obtaining a degree through combining short bursts of learning punctuated by periods of full-time employment to acting as a training ground—a forcing ground—for the army of professionals who will be required in medical centers, public health organizations, and in virtually every industry sector as they redesign fundamental processes and practice , students will seek to optimize health and safety as well as value in a world where social distancing, and routine testing, and hand washing, and teleworking, and so many other less-familiar practices are routinized.

In these regards and in others, there are enormous opportunities for those of us in higher education who are courageous enough to grab hold of them, and to release our grasp on many past practices as will be required in order to do so.

It is both dangerous and irresponsible for us to assume we will return to pre-pandemic normalcy and operate in ways that are largely unchanged by this event. 

At the present stage—working to flatten the curve—we find ourselves operating remotely with very few students and employees on-site at our universities and at the Office of the Chancellor. The broader circumstances impose unimaginable hardship on our healthcare workers, our emergency services, our small businesses, and on so many families across the state.

Shortly, we will be moving into an altogether different stage—doing our best in advance of having a vaccine that can inoculate us against COVID-19, therapeutics that can heal those who succumb to it, or even an understanding about the pandemic’s likely course. That phase is fraught with uncertainty. We face questions such as:

• What is the depth, breadth, and duration of the current economic downturn? How will it impact the state and federal funding upon which our students and universities depend? What financial impacts will our students experience? At the onset of the Great Recession, the net average price of attendance at a State System university was nearly half what it is today; how will this event affect students’ willingness and ability to pay the price we charge for the credentials we offer? 
• What about the credentials we offer? How relevant are they today and tomorrow? I have absolutely no doubt that the traditional, residential, comprehensive college experience will continue to be vitally important. But demand for that kind of education was already declining over the last decade during which we also saw growth in new modalities. Do we expect somehow that those trend lines will reverse course in the aftermath of this pandemic?
• How will issues of health and safety factor into our operations and our attractiveness to students? Preliminary surveys uncover understandable reticence about residential experiences—it’s hard to socially distance in a dorm room; in a classroom or lab; during office hours; in the dining hall; at band practice; on the football field. So too, employees’ rightful concerns for their own health and that of their loved ones factor into the mix.

Nascent national and statewide recovery plans reflect these uncertainties insofar as they are grounded in what appears to me to be stridently market-based, almost Darwinian, principles that suggest organizations will thrive if they make their “customers” and employees feel safe. They will continue to compete along the usual axes that typically include something about value, but now also include health/ safety.

We see this in early conversations across our industry about what it means to “open” in the fall. And while few institutions have committed publicly to what they intend in that regard, early indicators suggest that many are considering mixed modalities that serve some students on campus, some remotely, and still others in a hybrid fashion.

(WARNING: Tugging on this thread too hard will make your brain hurt…Does a mixed modality approach entail differential pricing? What do mixed-modality models mean for student services, student life, student engagement, campus culture? Which employees will telework? Are academic calendars and the credit-based models they support so rigid as to introduce health risks? Will regulatory agencies that govern accreditation, professional licensure, etc., be willing to relax pre-pandemic standards once we enter that likely long-lasting nether region that is somewhere between emergency response and return to normalcy?)

Does this new and emerging development excite me as an educator? Absolutely. There is an incredible range of opportunities through which we can vastly improve and extend the societal benefits of higher education.

Does this new and emerging development concern me as an educator? Absolutely.

Why should we assume that the colleges and universities enrolling a disproportion of historically underserved students—whether they are low-income, rural, or students of color—will succeed any better in this evolving, survival-of-the-fittest marketplace than they have in the one we are leaving behind?

There is potential here for higher education to reify prevailing socio-economic inequalities. Given that our country can only satisfy its workforce development needs on the backs of these very students, I am as terrified by potential economic impacts as I am by the prospect of even greater inequality.

Eventually, God willing, with vaccines and/or therapeutics in hand, we will transition into a post-pandemic future. At that time, this pandemic will appear in our review mirror. At that time, we will be looking forward—watching, waiting, preparing for the next one. 

So while, of course, we focus intently on immediate issues having to do with what it means to “re-open” in the fall, we have an obligation to address longer-term issues responsibly, realistically, transparently. Our university system was profoundly challenged in advance of this pandemic in ways that I have shared many times before. For the past 18-months, we have been advancing an aggressive plan with which to deal challenges in a financially sustaining way through a full-scale System Redesign that:

• leverages our scale in order to expand educational opportunities for all students, irrespective of their zip code, while driving operational efficiencies.
• meets the needs of adults who need to reskill and upskill to remain relevant in rapidly changing labor markets.
• ensures all students, irrespective of income and background have an opportunity not only to access an affordable higher education but also to complete a credential that enables them to sustain themselves and their families far into the future.

Thank goodness we have that plan in place. We have laid a lot of track in designing it and beginning to implement it. We have made particular progress stabilizing our universities financially and requiring plans for their financial sustainability. As we turn to our future, we are revisiting those plans, testing them against the new and challenging realities I outline here.

I need to be absolutely clear on one point: I neither believe nor expect that we can transition into our post-pandemic future by making only modest adjustments to our enterprise. On the contrary, I expect a fundamental restructuring is necessary. We were headed in that direction anyway through our System Redesign, but now an accelerated transformation is necessary.

The cost of not keeping up is irrelevance; it is the abandonment of our historic purpose; it is the abrogation of the sacred trust we have earned with the communities we serve.

I believe now more than ever in the mission of public higher education, its role as an engine of economic and social mobility, its service to community and nation.

I believe now more than ever that public higher education has an essential role to play, especially for those who would otherwise be threatened with being left behind.

I believe now more than ever that by working together, that by suspending our residual disbelief in or distrust of one another and our parochial self-interests, that by cementing our partnership with the Commonwealth, we will redefine what it means to be a public system of higher education. Together, we will discover how—in new and exciting ways—to leverage the power and promise of our historic institutions in the best interest of our Commonwealth and this nation.

I believe our greatest days lie ahead of us, and for the success of our institutions and our students, it is on them that we must continue to focus our attention.

Onwards.