If We’re Truly in the Knowledge Age, Why Is Higher Education in Crisis?

You’ve seen the headlines. University enrollments are dropping. Many institutions of higher learning, some founded more than a century ago, are either downsizing or shutting down. The trend is real and expected to continue into the foreseeable future.

A major reason for the downturn, in addition to changing demographics, is frustration over the high cost of tuition versus starting salaries. Many college grads end up in jobs unrelated to the years spent sitting in classrooms earning their degree. Given that much of the cost is covered by debt, they find themselves heavily burdened by loan payments while also trying to build a home, family, and career. And the career part often involves obtaining an advanced degree, which further increases the debt load. In the meantime, a major shift in the workforce has been quietly underway.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are roughly 7.7 million jobs available in the U.S. Interestingly, this translates to more job openings than the number of people actually looking for work. Opportunities abound, especially for people with the right skill set. However, just being able to read the job postings sometimes requires learning an entirely new vocabulary. Experience with clusters, nodes, and pods. Certification in AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes. And that’s just for the cloud-related occupations. According to Credential Engine (credentialengine.org), more than 6,700 different certifications are registered in the U.S. alone. This could explain why university enrollments are falling while trade school enrollments are increasing at a projected annual rate of around 6.6% through 2030. But what about the long term? How do we correct the growing strategic mismatch/lag between socioeconomic needs, the human and technological capacities required to fill those needs, and the education to develop and grow those capacities— all within the confines of a stubbornly entrenched system of higher education? If your answer includes a major role for KM, go to the head of the class.

Making Every University a KM Center of Excellence

Instead of trying to figure out how we can bend and twist and shape our legacy institutions to meet this ongoing shift, let's start with the desired outcome and work our way back. What lessons are required, and how can we best create and nurture them? A good place to start would be the uniquely human capacity for problem-solving under conditions of novelty and uncertainty—the ability to make sense of the world and take effective action. And let's not forget to mention empathy, something that AI tries to imitate but falls short of. Or simply the need for assurance that comes from person-to-person interaction and engagement. 

Such things can’t be learned sitting in a lecture hall. University of Texas at Austin history professor Steven Mintz writes: “Liberal democracy depends on citizens capable of critical reading, independent analysis, and sustained engagement with complexity. It requires people who can distinguish evidence from assertion, who can follow an argument across multiple pages, who can revise their thinking when confronted with new information, who can tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty without retreating into simplistic certainty” (substack.com/inbox/post/179443397). This is something to think about as scores of marketing campaigns saturate the internet with short, narrowly focused TikTok videos.