The Longer The Pandemic Lasts, The Greater Need for Change In Higher Ed

4 min read

If you have traveled by air in recent weeks, you know airline delays and cancellations have spiked because of a confluence of bad weather and crew shortages caused by the Omicron surge.

During a business trip of my own last week that was full of multiple delays, two missed connections, and five-plus hours of driving to alternative airports, I overhead a fellow traveler sum it up this way to her companion: "Remind me again why we're flying to this meeting?"

It's unlikely business travel will return to pre-pandemic levels unless the experience itself changes – whether it’s the reason we need to gather in-person or the airlines improve their service and rethink their pricing model. 

The longer the virus endures, the more it chips away at the ability of different sectors of the economy, like business travel, to bounce back.

Add higher ed to that list, too.

Campuses are now in their fifth semester of managing Covid-19, and as the New York Times reported recently, many colleges are now discussing Covid in “endemic” terms. But as the Wall Street Journal's Greg Ip wrote, the new normal of an endemic won’t be the same as the old normal of 2019. "Endemic Covid-19 will still take a toll on health, work and mobility; the only question is how big."

Five semesters into this crisis, higher ed still hasn't come to grips with revisiting an historical model that isn't totally dependent on in-person learning in a physical place resulting in a legacy credential. 

"We're exhausted and we're in denial," a college president told me. I asked if there was any discussion on campus about going virtual this spring with Omicron raging. “Zero,” the president said. “Harvard might be able to afford it, but we can’t.” 

Just like the airlines built a business model that depends on business travelers to subsidize low leisure fares, colleges campuses have constructed models that require revenue from students learning, living, eating, and being entertained in a physical location.

The longer that model is disrupted by the coronavirus, the less resilient it becomes to returning in its pre-pandemic form.

The latest enrollment numbers illustrate that just like business travelers aren’t returning to the skies, students aren’t returning to campuses. Federal relief concealed the financial problems for higher ed last year, but that $70 billion from Washington will run out this year.

Warnings about the end of the federal dollars are mentioned in nearly every Moody’s bond rating report that lands in my in-box these days. In downgrading Birmingham-Southern College this month, Moody's noted "the pandemic created revenue headwinds partially offset by federal relief funding in fiscal 2020 and fiscal 2021, but relief funding will be much lower in fiscal 2022."

Colleges and universities still have time to build a real, long-term competitive advantage coming out of the pandemic, but their runway is short. Learning, research, and the academic workplace itself are all undergoing a radical rethinking of their traditions and way of doing business.

It’s clear that technology will play a central role in what’s next for higher ed, but the college and university leaders I talk with are overwhelmed and struggling to cope. When I suggest that they’ll need to embark on a digital transformation agenda coming out of the pandemic, they tell me that’s what they think they’ve been doing given their huge investments in technology over the last decade.

The reality on many campuses is that technology has been mostly adapted to fit the old way of doing business. Instead of being seen as a service provider like a utility, technology is more valuable to higher ed when embedded in different aspect of campus life – to increase student success, research prowess, and prestige. Digital transformation means fundamentally stepping back and reconceiving the classroom, the student journey through college, the campus workplace, and how research is conducted.

A 2021 survey by Boston Consulting Group of higher education administrators found a wide divide between leaders who think their campuses have achieved digital transformation and those that actually have. The coronavirus exposed the lack of a reliable digital backbone at scores of colleges. Many systems cracked under the weight of heavy usage leaving administrators unable to plan in that critical period because they lacked real-time data about their operations.

Some campuses reacted well to the pandemic, which was largely made possible by digital plumbing laid years earlier. “We were planning for a pandemic before we even knew what a pandemic was,” Param Bedi, vice president for library and information technology at Bucknell University, told me.

Six years ago, Bucknell started planning the move of its enterprise systems to the cloud, which was completed in 2018. “We're not in the data center business; we are in the education business,” Bedi said. Freed from worrying about critical updates to systems, Bucknell estimates it found 40 percent more time on its IT staff to work on strategic projects with faculty and students.

The argument has always been that technology can go only so far to transform the underlying business model of higher ed. But I’ve found that that change is often enabled by technology with people at the core.

 

This article was written by Jeffrey Selingo from Forbes and was legally licensed through the Industry Dive Content Marketplace. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.

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Jeffrey Selingo