Preparing undergraduates for 2020 and beyond is the task facing higher education today, and that means making changes to the curriculum to provide students with the skill set they will need in the future, according to Michael Adams, president of Fairleigh Dickinson University.
In 2021, this fall’s freshman class will be about to turn 30, he says: “That’s when people are just beginning to make their greatest contributions to their family, their community, and the world.”
Adams, who is also president elect of the International Association of University Presidents, spoke at the Dodd Center on March 29, at the invitation of UConn’s Global Citizenship Curriculum Committee.
He said educators must pay attention to trends that will present opportunities and obstacles in the future. Otherwise, education will become at best irrelevant and at worst, destructive, because it won’t give the next generation the skills they need to survive.
Global World
Adams identified five current trends:
- Because of migration and travel, the world is becoming increasingly diverse.
- National borders are becoming increasingly permeable.
- There will be further “migration” of technology to the end-user.
- There will be unlimited access to digital information.
- The rate of change will accelerate constantly.
“By the year 2020, you’re going to be living, working, and playing with individuals different from you,” he said. “We must learn to be comfortable in environments of differences and diversity. We must understand that differences in humanity are not a weakness but a strength.”
“There is no passport control for health pandemics, global warming, terrorism, or economic interaction and impact,” he said. “They cross borders with impunity.”
He recalled how a crisis in a property company in Thailand in 1997 affected not only economies in Asia, but also the economy of the U.S.“
Even if you never leave home, events around the world are going to affect your lives,” he said. “You must pay attention to what is happening in the world. If not, you will be overtaken by a maelstrom of change.”
Adams noted that when typewriters were introduced in the late 19th century and mainframe computers in the mid-20th century, specialists had to process the information. Now, what Apple has dubbed the iGeneration no longer has to go through an intermediary to access digital tools. The iPhone, for example, invites the user to create new applications.
“You have to understand you’re empowered to adopt and adapt new and emerging tools,” he said.
Adams said there has been enormous growth in computing and memory capacity. A terabyte hard drive, for example, which costs only about $100, can store a trillion bytes of information. The punch cards used in early computers, on the other hand, held just a single byte.“You will have access to the knowledge base of our species,” he said.
Once digitized, information can be presented in many different formats, he added. “This changes the way we think about learning. You don’t have to follow the linear format [of a book] from page 1 to 300. … As the iGeneration, you can choose the way you learn.”
He said young people will need to know how not only how to access, but also how to evaluate and apply the knowledge that is available to them.
The half life of knowledge is now 5.4 years, especially in technical areas. “Almost by the time you’ve finished your undergraduate career, what you learned in Chemistry 1 will probably have radically changed,” he said. “Once you think you’ve figured something out, it will change again.”In that environment, he added, “agility, adaptability, and analytical skills become critically important.”
Global Curriculum
Adams went on to outline some of the steps Fairleigh Dickinson has taken, beginning with a new mission to create world citizens able to prosper in global culture.
Fairleigh Dickinson created a global campus community: currently there are 1,000 international students from 80 countries; established a global honors residence, similar to UConn’s Global House; began to deliver the New York Times free of charge to every undergraduate, and many faculty now use it to prompt discussion in class; and launched a program known as UN Pathways, which invites ambassadors and heads of state to give a public presentation on campus and then participate in a small group dinner at which half those attending are students.
“If a student does ok talking with someone who’s on the world stage, it gives them the idea that maybe they’ll be ok on the world stage too,” Adams said.
He said Study Abroad is regarded as a key component of undergraduate education. And as part of the curriculum, each student is required to take at least one online course per year, and 70 percent of courses are web-assisted. “Our goal is to bring the world to campus,” he said. “Agility with the Internet brings you the world.”
One new course includes online links to every major English-language newspaper in the world. “After reading the New York Times, students then go to Baghdad or Rio and read what’s being written there on the same subject,” he said.
Fairleigh Dickinson has also created a “global virtual faculty,” linking students in class with individuals from around the world in Internet chat rooms.
“We want students to understand that where you live on the globe influences how you see a problem and how you see the solution,” he said. Such differences, he added, “are not wrong, just different.”
In addition, the university was recently granted consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations Economic and Social Council – the first university to attain this status. Now, a couple of dozen Fairleigh Dickinson faculty members have been named as delegates to policy-making groups within the UN system, and will bring their experiences back to the classroom.
“We’ve got to give [the next generation] the world,” he said, “… and change some of the things we’re doing, in order to give them a new skill set.”
