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We've titled this post "Are Students Brains Changing Faster Than Higher Ed Can?" It's actually an untitled item from the Learning section of 2010's Trends to Watch and takes the form of an observation with related thoughts.

"Trends" is written by SCUP's director of education and planning, Phyllis T.H. Grummon, who will facilitate SCUP's Pacific Region's June 10 Trends in Higher Education Symposium the Claremont Colleges.

Learning

Observation

Changes in the learning environment, sometimes very subtle, can affect the performance of students in classrooms.

• Exposure to the letters “A” or “F” at the start of an examination seems to have an affect on how well students score. Subjects receiving an analogies test with the label “Test Bank ID: A” scored significantly better than students with “Test Bank: F”, with a “Test Bank ID: J” scoring in the middle.
• A study of high school students found that the gender of the images of scientists affected test scores for females. When all male examples were used, girls’ test scores were lower. They increased when textbook pictures were either all female or equally divided. 
• Recent research reports that a variety of skills are enhanced by playing action video games, including better visual selective attention and better focus.

Our Thoughts

Technology is also introducing changes in the environment. Our interaction with it appears to be influencing how our brains are wired. The power to increase learning comes with the reality of our evolving nervous system The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, (2010) Carr, N., W. W. Norton).

• Math software developed by the University of California-Irvine, based on neuroscience research, significantly increased the passing rate on a state examination in 64 of the lowest performing elementary schools in the state.
• Devices that track eye movements while reading on a screen can now be combined with software that infers a reader’s progress and provides help when eyes pause on words or names.
• Informal learning through television, video games, and the Internet has increased students’ abilities with visual-spatial reasoning.

You could not write a better lead-in paragraph for this article:

In August, 60 years after the University of Texas admitted its first black student, the school welcomed the first freshman class in which white students were in the minority.

For a related, classic article, see The New Demographics of Higher Education by George Keller. More quotes from the current article, below.

Stan Jones, former Indiana commissioner of higher education and the current president of Complete College America, a national nonprofit group dedicated to boosting the number of college graduates, said the numbers have been telling the story for years. “But it hasn’t necessarily gotten through to policy-makers that this was going on, and clearly not to the general public,” Mr. Jones said. “All of us are seeing it happening faster than we had expected.”

For example, although their birth rate is growing at a significant clip, Mr. Jones said, Hispanics do not graduate from high school, go on to college or graduate in the same numbers as white students. “If you look at the freshman class everywhere in this country, it is more representative than it’s ever been,” he said. “But in four years, if you look at the graduating class, it is not going to be representative of the country, because many of those students from the underrepresented groups won’t make it to graduation.”

Educators give several reasons for the disparity, including economic differences, the comparative quality of college preparation at urban, rural and suburban schools, and a sense of isolation among those who are the first in their families to go to college.

SCUPer and renowned higher education thought leader George Keller is no longer with us. However, his vision and intellect are visible in some of the papers he shared with us in higher education literature before he died.

In 2001, at SCUP–46, George presented, to a standing room only crowd, "The New Demographics in Higher Education." That content was published in an article of the same name in The Review of Higher Education. 

You may be able to access the full article at Project Muse. (If your campus or company provides access. Still within "fair use," we have quoted more extensively here than usual for those of you who cannot access it.) It is worth a careful read in the context of how much has changed in only ten years:

Population:

For U.S. colleges and universities, the sudden turn in world fertility rates means that they may see a new mix of the nearly 500,000 students who enroll annually from abroad and may need to pay greater attention to the Muslim and African worlds. They will also need to reassess their programs of study abroad. The smaller number of young people in the United States and other developed nations will require these countries to help their no-longer expanding workforce become more productive. This development should further improve the position of women in both higher education and the economy, and it will press governments to enlarge the skills, education, and opportunities for their minority and immigrant--and perhaps their older--citizens. Higher education and job training--and retraining--will be more important to insure that the entire labor force is capable of productive work. Retraining has already become a prominent feature at many of America's community colleges.

Aging:

What is less known is that American's elderly are the new rich--the healthiest, wealthiest old people in history. MIT management professor Lester Thurow (1996) argues that they are "a new class of people"--the "woopies" (well-off older people). have a median per capita income 67% above that of the population as a whole. As recently as 1970, they were the poorest group in U.S. society; but today their poverty rate is lower and median household wealth is greater than that of any other age group in the country. Increasingly, portions of the tuition of numerous college students are being paid for by grandparents. Many universities have made deferred giving for the elderly a major new emphasis in their fund-raising efforts and have begun importuning their older alumni and friends to remember the institution in their wills and trusts.

Immigration/International:

But numerous critics urge colleges to become even more aggressive in recruiting immigrant youths and more receptive to them so that the future leadership in the United States will be close to representative of society's new ethnic distribution (Aguirre & Martinez, 1993). This is comparatively easy to do for many Asian youths because of their often superior school records, but is harder to do for the children of Mexican immigrants because Mexican-American students have the highest noncompletion rate (almost 50%) from high school of all ethnic groups. Yet the need for more education among young Mexican-Americans is urgent because Mexican-American women have the highest birth rate of any ethnic group, according to a 1998 National Center for Health Statistics report, and because the birth [End Page 225] rate for Hispanic teenagers now exceeds that of Black teenagers. Though Latinos may soon become America's largest minority group--36 to 38 million--in 1996 they earned only 4% of the college degrees awarded.

Family Life:

But whatever the reasons, the reformation of traditional family life is having profound effects on society, children and the schools, and on institutions of higher education. The most visible and tragic is the startling new poverty of the young. According to the 1998 study by the National Center for Children in Poverty, about 38% of the nation's poor today are children. They have replaced the elderly as the largest group in poverty. The center's director says, "The United States continues to have the highest rate of young-child poverty of any Western industrialized nation" (qtd. in Lewin, 1998, p. A19). The major cause is the increase in children living with unmarried mothers; such children are five times as likely to be poor as those living with married parents. More than 60% of the households in the bottom quintile of family incomes are headed by women.

Diversity Statistics:

Most colleges and universities still keep diversity statistics for reporting purposes by the four OMB "racial" categories, and many institutions have affirmative action goals by "race." But the new ethnic and religious intermarriages are beginning to produce undergraduates who do not fit into any category neatly. For some institutions the idea of affirmative action in its present form will increasingly be viewed as outmoded, although there is still considerable support on most campuses for special treatment for nonimmigrant African Americans, most of whom cruelly suffered until a century ago from slavery and until recently from widespread discrimination (Patterson, 1997). The growing creolization of the students, staff, and faculty in U.S. higher education is also likely to diminish the current high degree of attention to color, ethnic, and religious classifications.

The Bottom Line:

The changing demographics of the U.S. population (and of other nations) has quietly but profoundly begun to pull higher education in different directions and to cause the introduction of new academic programs, practices, and personnel policies. The efforts are likely to continue. Higher education's leaders and scholars would be prudent to understand the underlying demographic shifts shaping their future.

They are not like us! And you've probably already seen this, it's all over, but just in case … .

The class of 2014 has never found Korean-made cars unusual on the Interstate and five hundred cable channels, of which they will watch a handful, have always been the norm. Since "digital" has always been in the cultural DNA, they've never written in cursive and with cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wrist watch. Dirty Harry (who’s that?) is to them a great Hollywood director. The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat. 

Nonetheless, they plan to enjoy college. The males among them are likely to be a minority. They will be armed with iPhones and BlackBerries, on which making a phone call will be only one of many, many functions they will perform. They will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them.  A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of scholarship. (emphasis added) They will discover how to research information in books and journals and not just on-line. Their professors, who might be tempted to think that they are hip enough and therefore ready and relevant to teach the new generation, might remember that Kurt Cobain is now on the classic oldies station. The college class of 2014 reminds us, once again, that a generation comes and goes in the blink of our eyes, which are, like the rest of us, getting older and older.

Up until the 20th century, "adolescence" was not a meaningful concept to our cultural ancestors. Psychologists are now seeing the development of another new stage in life for American youth: Emerging Adulthood.

During the ... emerging adulthood ... young men and women are more self-focused than at any other time of life, less certain about the future and yet also more optimistic, no matter what their economic background. This is where the “sense of possibilities” comes in ... they have not yet tempered their ideal istic visions of what awaits. “The dreary, dead-end jobs, the bitter divorces, the disappointing and disrespectful children . . . none of them imagine that this is what the future holds for them,” he wrote. Ask them if they agree with the statement “I am very sure that someday I will get to where I want to be in life,” and 96 percent of them will say yes. But despite elements that are exciting, even exhilarating, about being this age, there is a downside, too: dread, frustration, uncertainty, a sense of not quite understanding the rules of the game ... .

Some scientists would argue that this ambivalence reflects what is going on in the brain, which is also both grown-up and not-quite-grown-up. Neuroscientists once thought the brain stops growing shortly after puberty, but now they know it keeps maturing well into the 20s. This new understanding comes largely from a longitudinal study of brain development sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, which started following nearly 5,000 children at ages 3 to 16 (the average age at enrollment was about 10). The scientists found the children’s brains were not fully mature until at least 25. “In retrospect I wouldn’t call it shocking, but it was at the time,” Jay Giedd, the director of the study, told me. “The only people who got this right were the car-rental companies.”

This article is a nice summary of the ongoing arguments/discussions about whether or not information technology tools are changing the way we think and learning, even the way our brains develop. And, if that is so, is that a good thing or a bad thing. Whatever your opinion is, if you are involved in student communications or the design of learning programs, this is something you are probably already following closely.

Techno-Cassandras fret over what's happening to our attention spans, our ability to think and read deeply, to enjoy time with our own thoughts or a good book.

Techno-enthusiasts scoff that those concerns are nothing new: Socrates, it's pointed out, thought that writing itself would harm a person's ability to internalize learning, the printed word acting as a substitute for true understanding. Technologies such as printing, and in recent decades television and the pocket calculator, have all served time as villains only to become innocuous, commonplace parts of modern life. Why should helpful new technologies from Facebook and Twitter to iPhones and laptops be any different?

Those caught in the middle are aware that something significant is happening, but wary about whether they or others are grasping the big picture. Is technology making us dumb and distracted or turning us into expert information finders and magnificent multitaskers? Is being connected online 24/7 good or bad? Is there even a good way to tell?

This article from National Journal magazine synthesizes some of what we've been watching as a trend that may strongly impact the future political willingness of states to support higher education as a public good. It could have a major retardation effect on the federal and foundational efforts to increase the numbers of American college graduates.

Already, some observers see the tension between the older white and younger nonwhite populations in disputes as varied as Arizona's controversial immigration law and a California lawsuit that successfully blocked teacher layoffs this year at predominantly minority schools. The 2008 election presented another angle on this dynamic, with young people (especially minorities) strongly preferring Democrat Barack Obama, and seniors (especially whites) breaking solidly for Republican John McCain.

Over time, the major focus in this struggle is likely to be the tension between an aging white population that appears increasingly resistant to taxes and dubious of public spending, and a minority population that overwhelmingly views government education, health, and social-welfare programs as the best ladder of opportunity for its children. "Anything to do with children in the public arena is going to generate a stark competition for resources," Frey says.

The twist is that graying white voters who are skeptical of public spending may have more in common with the young minorities clamoring for it than either side now recognizes. Today's minority students will represent an increasing share of tomorrow's workforce and thus pay more of the payroll taxes that will be required to fund Social Security and Medicare benefits for the mostly white Baby Boomers. Many analysts warn that if the U.S. doesn't improve educational performance among African-American and Hispanic children, who now lag badly behind whites in both high school and college graduation rates, the nation will have difficulty producing enough high-paying jobs to generate the tax revenue to maintain a robust retirement safety net.

"Based on what they say today, what will future leaders do differently from today's CEOs?"

That's the question to be answered by IBM's large Global Student Study. The full report can be downloaded from the link below. Reports on the study say that the most important difference is that college students foresee a future of dwindling resources with growing demands, and that they understand sustainability to be a global issue.

Only 29% of CEOs think that scarcity of resources will be affect businesses in the future, while 65% of students do. Students also expect far more influence in related areas from the development of emerging economies.

Sadly for senior managers, the student study reveals a big discrepancy between these future leaders' view of the world and that of present CEOs. Indeed, twice as many students as CEOs say that "globalization" and "environmental issues," as they converge, will have a significant impact on organizations of the future. In particular, those students who believe that economic power is shifting from developed to emerging economies are much more likely to expect a major impact of sustainability issues.

These future leaders view sustainability as a globally-interconnected phenomenon. For them, the rapid growth in emerging nations like India and China and continued high consumption in developed countries will soon deplete natural resources like water and energy, creating global resource scarcity. Interestingly, while 65% of students believe that scarcity of resources will significantly impact organizations in coming years, only 29% of current CEOs believe so. In North America, students are three times as likely as CEOs to believe this.

Click this title, Inheriting A Complex World: Future Leaders Envision Sharing the Planet, to visit the original resource.

The purpose of this article is to frame—and reframe—the work of student affairs. Evolving paradigms have defined and advanced this work, which is dedicated to total student development and the betterment of society. The article promotes integrative learning as a new framework for student affairs. This paradigm, grounded in theory, research, and practice, crosses all boundaries of what, where, how, and with whom learning occurs to advance cohesive and synergistic student-centered learning. To live into this seamless model, student affairs professionals must go beyond the “what” to living into the “so what” of their work as educators and reflective practitioners.