Frankly, we're envious of Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. Not because her book is selling so well, but because she is having what seems to be a delightful time, traveling and meeting with many of the movers and shakers in higher education. Her blog, DIY U, is where she posts about some of those experiences.

In Education and the Laying on of Hands (which refers to that mysterious something a professor can only do in a face to face, physical classroom) she shares observations and communications she's recently had about a panel discussion she participated in at UC San Diego recently.

What we find most interesting is her observation in response to the hundreds of professors who signed a petition against the findings of Washington State's "2020 Commission on the Future of Higher Education." They wrote: "One of the problems with the newest crop of distance-learning institutions is that they are motivated entirely by profit" She replies: This is true. The gauntlet has been thrown down. Public institutions need to get involved in defining online learning education or it will be defined for them by a set of institutions with very different agendas. (Our emphasis.)

 

"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.

 

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

 

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Here's your SCUP Link to "Long Road to Adulthood Is Growing Even Longer"

If you've got children in their 20s or early 30s you've already noticed this. And it's one of the ways that the ever-growing pool of "non-traditional" students keeps growing. This trend is studied by the McArthur Foundation's Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood. The link to the left is to the network, the title link, above, is to a story about the research in The New York Times.

“A new period of life is emerging in which young people are no longer adolescents but not yet adults,” Mr. Furstenberg said.

National surveys reveal that an overwhelming majority of Americans, including younger adults, agree that between 20 and 22, people should be finished with school, working and living on their own. But in practice many people in their 20s and early 30s have not yet reached these traditional milestones.

Marriage and parenthood — once seen as prerequisites for adulthood — are now viewed more as lifestyle choices, according to a new report released by Princeton University and the Brookings Institution.

The stretched-out walk to independence is rooted in social and economic shifts that started in the 1970s, including a change from a manufacturing to a service-based economy that sent many more people to college, and the women’s movement, which opened up educational and professional opportunities.

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

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Here's your SCUP Link to "'The Shallows': This Is Your Brain Online"

We like this discussion of how reading on line is changing the way we read. We welcomed exposure in this article to ideas from thinkers who don't necessarily think this is bad. In fact, some argue, the "literary" stage of our culture may be ending and the period of post-literacy might become (and be good) the norm. Note that this includes an NPR audio interview.

Some thinkers welcome the eclipse of the book and the literary mind it fostered. In a recent address to a group of teachers, Mark Federman, an education researcher at the University of Toronto, argued that literacy, as we've traditionally understood it, "is now nothing but a quaint notion, an aesthetic form that is as irrelevant to the real questions and issues of pedagogy today as is recited poetry — clearly not devoid of value, but equally no longer the structuring force of society." The time has come, he said, for teachers and students alike to abandon the "linear, hierarchical" world of the book and enter the Web's "world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity" — a world in which "the greatest skill" involves "discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux."

Clay Shirky, a digital-media scholar at New York University, suggested in a 2008 blog post that we shouldn't waste our time mourning the death of deep reading — it was overrated all along. "No one reads War and Peace," he wrote, singling out Tolstoy's epic as the quintessence of high literary achievement. "It's too long, and not so interesting." People have "increasingly decided that Tolstoy's sacred work isn't actually worth the time it takes to read it." The same goes for Proust's In Search of Lost Time and other novels that until recently were considered, in Shirky's cutting phrase, "Very Important in some vague way." Indeed, we've "been emptily praising" writers like Tolstoy and Proust "all these years." Our old literary habits "were just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access." Now that the Net has granted us abundant "access," Shirky concluded, we can at last lay those tired habits aside.

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

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Here's your SCUP Link to "Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution"

Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink, authors, respectively, of the books - Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age - are interviewed for Wired magazine. The conversation was "about motivation and media, social networking, sitcoms, and why the hell people spend their free time editing Wikipedia." Free time you ask? Well, there are people who have some, especially those (like me) who watch no television. What Shirky and Pink talk about is how that time is now "put to use" instead of "used up." 

A thought-stimulating, brief interview:

Shirky: We’re still in the very early days. So far, it’s largely young people who are exploring the alternatives, but already they are having a huge impact. We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, for example, using Wikipedia, to see how far we still have to go. All the articles, edits, and arguments about articles and edits represent around 100 million hours of human labor. That’s a lot of time. But remember: Americans watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year.

Pink: Amazing. All the time that people devote to Wikipedia—which that guy considered weird and wasteful—is really a tiny portion of our worldwide cognitive surplus. It’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total.

Shirky: And it represents a very different and very powerful type of motivation.

Pink: Exactly. Too many people hold a very narrow view of what motivates us. They believe that the only way to get us moving is with the jab of a stick or the promise of a carrot. But if you look at over 50 years of research on motivation, or simply scrutinize your own behavior, it’s pretty clear human beings are more complicated than that.

 

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This article was published in January 2009 in the second of two themed issues of Planning for Higher Education. SCUP members most likely have print copies, and can also access the articles from SCUP's website. In order to bring it out and make it available to everyone, we have assembled all of the articles into this digital (PDF) SCUP Portfolio.

When it comes to building student housing, the stakes for universities and colleges have never been higher. From competing for prospective students and environmental bragging rights to contesting for space on the typical campus, institutions face a fundamentally different landscape than they did when housing previous generations of students. A national sampling of student residential projects and housing data provide some indication of emerging trends. Universities and colleges will increasingly look to the campus edge (even in difficult environments), will challenge themselves to build sustainably (even where budgets are tight), and will partner or compete with private developers in a variety of contexts. These emerging trends are set against the already-established trend that finds students enjoying—and expecting—more luxurious accommodations than were once typical.

Citation
John Martin and Mark Allen. 2009. Students in My Backyard: Housing at the Campus Edge and Other Emerging Trends in Residential Development. Planning for Higher Education. 37(2): 34–43.

CLICK HERE for the full text of Students in My Backyard: Housing at the Campus Edge and Other Emerging Trends in Residential Development

From the January–February–March 2009 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the focus of the article, Make Way for Millennials!, v37n1, pp. 7–17 by Persis C. Rickes You can read the entire article here [LINK TO COME], in Planning for Higher Education.

The article "blurb" reads: From generations in perspectives, through generational cycles, and on to the influence of Millennials on campus space.

[ABSTRACT TO COME]

Note that this issue of Planning is the second of a two-part themed volume with the overall title, Student Life. The first part was published in October 2008. Assembled, the two parts will be available later in 2009 for purchase as a single PDF document for your quick and easy reference.

SCUPer Mary Jo Olenick was the March guest blogger for The Chronicle of Higher Education's Buildings & Grounds Blog. Now she takes her turn in a live, interactive "brown bag" on the Chronicle website on Thursday, May 22 at Noon Eastern time. Why don't we join in? You could continue this discussion F2F in the AT & IV, Learning Space Design roundtables at SCUP-43 on Monday and Wednesday mornings.

Architects and planners who design for colleges must be aware of how today's students live and how their social networks function. Before cellphones spread across campuses, for instance, students relied on common gathering spaces for both planned and spontaneous meetings. Now that just about every student has a cellphone, though, students have much less need for lobbies and atriums — they can track down their friends instantly. And generous public spaces will not encourage social interaction if there's a stigma attached to being seen without your friends (you should at least be seen talking to them on your cellphone). So should that space be devoted to some other use? What other new priorities for planners and architects have been prompted by the cellphone generation? Are traditional notions of the college campus due for a radical rethinking?