“Universities are now shutting at a rate of one each week. What takes place to the students?” Jon Marcus asked in a current Hechinger Record item. It’s not a rhetorical inquiry– and it doesn’t have a simple answer. As instructors, we’ve checked out the headlines, seen the numbers, and felt the stress. Undergraduate enrollment is down. Pupil self-confidence is eroding. The enrollment high cliff looms.
However rather than asking when college will fall short, we might ask: Suppose this is a market improvement– not a collapse? What happens if the problem isn’t college itself, however just how we’ve mounted its worth and just how we’ve instructed? What if this moment is less an ending and more a start?
In the face of unpredictability, it’s alluring to focus on control: measurable discovering outcomes, career-ready skills, standardized assessments. Yet today’s students are going into an affordable task market– and a world specified by accelerating adjustment, arising modern technologies, and challenges we haven’t yet called. That means our mentor needs to prepare them what’s most likely and for what’s possible– and also what’s unknowable.
Ronald Beghetto’s framework for “informing for unknowable futures” supplies a useful lens. He recommends 3 degrees of prep work:
- Informing for likely futures : gearing up students with foundational abilities and durable understanding.
- Informing for possible futures : helping trainees construct agency, imagination, and versatility.
- Educating for unknowable futures : welcoming pupils to grapple with unpredictability through representation and creativity.
Each degree calls for a change in exactly how we consider learning and a brand-new collection of pedagogical dedications.
1 Informing for Likely Futures: Revamping Tasks Around Students’ The Real Worlds
Occupation readiness remains a core worry. However typically, our tools for constructing it are misaligned with pupils’ real experiences. Take the timeless service instance technique, for example: lots of situations facility Fortune 500 CEOs or worldwide situations, which can feel abstract or hard to reach to undergrads, especially first-generation trainees.
That’s why I currently write my very own instances: short, specific, and grounded in contexts my students understand. In one recent one, I checked out a problem in between student-athletes and faculty at a nearby Division III college. For my mainly student-athlete course, this knew and consequently grounding. Their analysis changed. So did their engagement.
Creating projects that show students’ most likely futures– their majors, their markets, their areas– signals that their lives are valid sites of knowing. It develops relevance. And it reminds them that expert decision-making does not start “out there.” It begins below.
2 Educating for Possible Futures: Using EdTech with Purpose
Trainees also require to establish adaptive skills: just how to assume seriously, browse ambiguity, and examine devices in advancing atmospheres. EdTech is an excellent area to practice this.
Today’s education and learning market is swamped with devices– over 370 vendors throughout over 40 market sectors, according to Encoura. However quantity isn’t top quality. Too often, we take on tools based upon uniqueness or institutional fads as opposed to training worth.
To sustain trainees in building discernment, we must design it ourselves. That means asking: Does this tool address an actual trouble in my course? Does it supply on its pledges? Does it support finding out equitably and sustainably?
In other words, we must move from easy adopters to willful evaluators and invite trainees into that evaluative procedure. Helping them think of just how modern technology shapes learning (and their very own firm within it) furnishes them for any atmosphere, not simply the one we have actually constructed.
3 Educating for Unknowable Futures: Making Area for Representation
Preparing trainees for the genuinely unidentified calls for something more extreme: making space for efficiency, yes, but likewise for reflection.
In a current MBA program on arrangement and problem, I made a vibrant step: I designated once a week representation journals– raw, stream-of-consciousness access that connected program motifs to trainees’ lived experiences. Some trainees withstood initially. However by the end, numerous stated it altered the way they came close to course and life
Representation is frequently dealt with as an add-on, something optional or “soft.” Yet it’s necessary. It helps trainees surface assumptions, question choices, and practice metacognition. And in a world where knowledge and skills are frequently advancing, the capability to learn exactly how to learn may be the most long lasting skill of all.
Possibility Assuming, in Practice
If our present minute is a reckoning, after that our action has to be just one of duty. We can not guarantee our pupils a specific future. But we can use them the tools to form one.
Beghetto calls this “agentic awareness”– an idea in one’s capacity to influence end results. It’s an educational program and a posture. And it’s something we can model by exactly how we instruct: with creativity, clearness, and curiosity.
So the next time you see one more headline regarding greater ed’s collapse, ask yourself: Suppose we treated this as a minute to reimagine rather than as a dilemma to survive?
That’s durability, and it’s possibility reasoning in action.
Three Small Shifts You Can Make This Term
Currently is the ideal time to start leaning into the possibility of our problems. To do so, attempt:
- Upgrading one project to reflect your trainees’ actual occupation goals or lived experiences. Satisfying pupils where they are will certainly aid them far better picture where they’re headed.
- Asking your class innovation better concerns. Push beyond features to genuine finding out results when you select to welcome EdTech right into your classroom.
- Making reflection component of the quality. Don’t treat it as busywork yet as weighted, essential meaning-making.
Higher education might be facing unmatched interruption, however disruption doesn’t need to imply decrease. As a matter of fact, the classroom may be among the last areas where we still have real influence over what follows. Each lesson we create, each conversation we assist in, each moment we produce for reflection– these are acts of future-building.
Educating for unknowable futures does not mean we require to predict what’s following. It means we aid students discover to ask better inquiries, adjust with self-confidence, and acknowledge their own ability to shape modification. And it suggests we accept that very same attitude ourselves.
The future of higher education will not be conserved by brushing up reforms or silver-bullet innovations. It will be co-created– one thoughtful task, one willful choice, one student each time. Which work begins not in remote plan conferences, however right below, in our classrooms.
Laura Nicole Miller, DET, is an assistant professor in the Grenon School of Service at Assumption University, where she shows business communication, advertising and marketing, and monitoring. A first-generation college grad and previous EdTech exec, she studies just how communication practices shape equity, count on, and pupil success in high-stakes settings.
Referrals
Bauman, D. (2024, February7 Colleges were already bracing for an ‘registration high cliff.’ Currently there might be a second one. The Chronicle of College https://www.chronicle.com/article/colleges-were-already-bracing-for-an-enrollment-cliff-now-there-might-be-a-second-one
Beghetto, R. A. (2023 Widening perspectives of the feasible in education. Possibility Studies & & Society, 1 (4, 414 – 426 https://doi.org/ 10 1177/ 27538699231182014
Binkley, C. (2023, March10 Why a lot more Americans are missing college. PBS News. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/why-more-americans-are-skipping-college
Craft, A. (2015 Possibility thinking: From what is to what might be. In R. Wegerif, L. Li, & & J. C. Kaufman (Eds.), The Routledge worldwide handbook of study on training reasoning (pp. 15–26 Routledge. https://doi.org/ 10 4324/ 9781315797021
Encoura. (2023 College modern technology landscape study. https://www.encoura.org/eduventures-research/evolve-your-online-strategy/tech-landscape/
Fry, R., Braga, D., & & Parker, K. (2024, May23 Is college worth it? Seat Proving Ground. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/ 2024/ 05/ 23/ is-college-worth-it- 2/
Marcus, J. (2024, April26 Colleges are currently shutting at a rate of one a week. What takes place to the pupils? The Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/colleges-are-now-closing-at-a-pace-of-one-a-week-what-happens-to-the-students/
Miller, L. N. (2025 “D-III students are worthy of much better”: calculated communication with university stakeholders. The CASE Journal, 21 (3, 493 – 516 https://doi.org/ 10 1108/ TCJ- 06 – 2024 – 0184
Miller, L.N. (2025 We require to ask smarter inquiries of ed tech. Inside Higher Ed https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/ 2025/ 07/ 30/ we-need-ask-smarter-questions-ed-tech-opinion