SCUP's 48th Annual, International Conference

Robert B. Reich is an American political economist, professor, author, and political commentator, and has served in three national administrations, most recently as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration.

Reich will address three key drivers of change in the economy that make higher education more important than ever—not just for individuals who will need a degree to an adequate income—but for our economy and society. Those drivers are (1) globalization, (2) technology, and (3) demographics.

Global competitiveness of the United States (or any place in the US) is no longer a matter of where things can be produced at lowest cost, but where highest value is created. Global capital is increasingly rootless and is investing wherever it can find innovation and high productivity. Higher education is the key to this.

Technological change is replacing jobs at an ever-increasing rate, but such job displacement doesn’t mean fewer jobs. Over the long term, it means lower wages for those who don’t have sufficient education to utilize the technology. Most new jobs are being created in the personal service sector—retail, restaurant, hotel, hospital, childcare, and elder care—where people can’t easily be replaced by technologies. The median wage has stagnated for 30 years even though productivity has continued to increase. Reich observes that almost all the gains from growth have gone to the top one percent, who have the education and connections they need to fully take advantage of technological changes and globalization. All this means that higher education isn’t just a private investment; it’s a public good. And public investment is the key. Reich observes that sadly, since the late 1970s, our nation’s investments in higher education have slowed, as has the rate of increase of graduates with university degrees. He calls this nonsensical. 

Time magazine named Reich one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century, and The Wall Street Journal named him one of the nation’s ten most influential business thought-leaders. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers Aftershock and The Work of Nations. His latest, Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix Them is now out in paperback. Reich is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause. In 2003, Reich was awarded the prestigious Václav Havel Vision Foundation Prize for pioneering work in economic and social thought. His commentaries can be heard weekly on public radio's "Marketplace." He received his BA from Dartmouth College, his MA from Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and his JD from Yale Law School.

Follow Robert Reich on Twitter: @RBReich
Read his blog.

“In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist.”

Quote from Nathan Harden in the January/February 2013 issue: The End of the University as We Know It (The American Interest)

Many think it will be sooner.

Capture a very broad picture of the transformation that is underway in American higher education today. How should you be thinking about your institution in a larger landscape? Where will the disruptions come from? Consider the ramifications of broken business models, rising competition, exorbitant tuition costs, institutional loss of power to controlled events, changing faculty roles, more student control over their educational destiny, changes in course delivery and assessment, and new providers entering the space of traditional higher education providers. How will this information affect how you navigate in the complex and rapid swirl of higher education change? Better understanding of the elements of transformation will help prepare you for future potential disruptions that could impact your institution.

George Mehaffy has served for 13 years as the vice president for academic leadership and change at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) in Washington, DC, a higher education association representing 400 public colleges and universities and their 3.8 million students. His division is responsible for developing and managing programs for member institutions in areas such as organizational change, civic engagement, leadership development, undergraduate education, technology, international education, and teacher education. Mehaffy works closely with university presidents and chief academic officers on a variety of national initiatives.  Each year, his division organizes a number of conferences, including two national conferences each year for AASCU chief academic officers. He has directed a series of innovative projects, including international programs with China and Liberia; a technology transformation annual conference with EDUCAUSE and the University of Central Florida; and two major national studies of student success. In 2003, he launched the American Democracy Project, a civic engagement initiative involving 240 colleges and universities, in partnership with The New York Times. Most recently, he organized the Red Balloon Project, a national initiative to transform undergraduate education. Before coming to AASCU, he had more than 20 years of teaching and administrative experience in higher education in Texas, New Mexico, and California.

Read George Mehaffy's provocative article on "Challenge and Change" in EDUCAUSE Review Online!

We are rapidly moving into a world in which amplified individuals—people empowered by technologies and the collective intelligence of their social networks—can do things that previously only a large organization or no one organization could do. These amplified individuals are engaging in a new form of value creation Marina Gorbis calls "socialstructing"—garnering micro-contributions from large networks of people to create large impacts. What are the key elements of socialstructing and what skills will people need to have to thrive in this world? Based on her recently published book The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World, Gorbis will share case studies and lessons from pioneers of socialstructing. 

Futurist Marina Gorbis is at the forefront of understanding the implications of the digital world on an organizational and individual level. She has worked with hundreds of organizations in business, education, government, and philanthropy, bringing a future perspective to improve innovation capacity, develop strategies, and design new products and services. A native of Odessa, Ukraine, Gorbis’s research now in Silicon Valley helps organizations systematically think about the future. She has been a guest blogger on BoingBoing.net, writes for IFTF and major media outlets, and is a frequent speaker on future organizational, technology, and social issues. Gorbis’s current research focus is social production (aggregating microcontributions from large networks of people utilizing social tools and technologies to create a new kind of wealth) and how it is changing the face of business, medicine, education, banking, scientific research, and government, a topic explored in detail in her newly released 2013 book, The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World. She explores how new technologies are giving individuals so much power to connect and share resources that we are entering a new era and inventing radically new types of organizations and services. She holds a BA in psychology and a master’s degree in public policy from University of California, Berkeley.

Read Marina Gorbis's blog on Harvard Business Review: "The Reality of What Makes Silicon Valley Tick."
Follow Marina Gorbis on Twitter:@mgorbis