Students to decide which institutions survive COVID-19

Students have the ability to decide which higher education institutions survive the coronavirus crisis and it won’t be enough for universities to say “we’ve moved online and everything is fine”, the launch of a new report into the shape of higher education after COVID-19 was told.

Speaking on Monday 4 May, Ben Nelson, chair and CEO of Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute, warned that students could “bring institutions down to bankruptcy” by opting out of college this year, as they watch universities struggle to overcome the impact of the virus on teaching and learning.

Nelson was taking part in a virtual panel discussion to launch the report titled New Schools of Thought: Innovative models for delivering higher education, developed through a partnership between the Qatar Foundation and the Economist Intelligence Unit.

He said: “Students have an extraordinary responsibility this year because for the first time in my living memory they have the ability to bring institutions down to bankruptcy.

“They can just vote with their feet in ways they have never been able to before.”

Universities need to communicate

“On the one hand, students have a responsibility to understand that just opting to skip out on college for a year, as many can afford to do, can literally shut down the institution, whereas, on the other hand, if institutions don’t realise that they need to communicate what it is that is happening next year for students, students should do exactly that.”

Nelson said that for the first time, students had the role of determining what universities should be doing “and which ones will have the right to serve them in moving forward”.

He also warned institutions that what happens after COVID-19 “will depend largely on what they do during COVID-19” and urged universities against believing that marketing will extricate them from the crisis and that they can get away with saying: “We’ve done it, we have moved to online and everything is fine.”

Opening the webinar, Her Excellency Sheikha Hind bint Hamad Al Thani, vice-chair and CEO of the Qatar Foundation, said the report was written before the world was hit by the coronavirus, but added: “COVID-19 had done the impossible. It has changed the way we teach and learn almost overnight.”

In her video introduction, she wondered whether we should be “future-proofing” an education system that “puts values in our children that we spend a lifetime to unlearn” or change the language altogether?

Setting the scene for the hour-long online webinar, watched by a global audience of over 1,000, she quoted the Arabic saying: “Knowledge is sought. It doesn’t come to you. You go to it.”

Claire Casey, managing director of public policy at the Economist Intelligence Unit, opened the main session by asking the expert panel how they thought technology could be leveraged to deliver better and more inclusive education at a time when more than 1.5 billion learners around the world are unable to attend school or classes because of COVID-19.

Inequalities laid bare

Mary Schmidt Campbell, president of Spelman College, said the sudden closure of campuses and residence halls had “laid bare all the inequalities that completely undermine a student’s ability to be a healthy, productive, present and engaged student”.

Her college is part of the Atlanta University Center Consortium in the United States and describes itself as “a global leader in the education of women of African descent”.

Campbell said: “We switched from in-person to online education within a week and learned that 80% of our students had never taken an online course and that a significant number didn’t have adequate laptops or laptops at all.”

With so many students not having adequate access to the internet, Campbell said: “We had to really rethink our pedagogy and our faculty was pretty extraordinary. It showed me that when we needed to, we could be really innovative.”

Francisco Marmolejo, education advisor to the Qatar Foundation, said that worldwide only 60% of students have been able to transfer to remote teaching and learning systems, and there was a need to address “the other 40% not able to access their teaching”.

For some teachers, the transition to online had been “traumatic”, said Marmolejo, with some teaching unions around the world blocking online teaching “because they fear that eventually they might be substituted”.

He said another challenge was how to “keep students engaged, motivated and in good mental health” while they were unable to socialise with others.

Challenge assumptions

He suggested that COVID-19 gave higher education the opportunity to “challenge assumptions and should be the catalyst for change”. Higher education should not assume it will have the luxury of returning to business as usual.

“It is time to think creatively and redesign higher education so it becomes responsive to the needs of the future society,” said Marmolejo.

Tim Blackman, vice-chancellor of the Open University, the largest higher education institution in the United Kingdom with 170,000 students, said the impact of the coronavirus had been less challenging for them than for bricks and mortar institutions, as they mainly work through virtual learning environments and found high demand for their free online courses from those laid off by COVID-19.

He argued that the internet and digital media represented a powerful way to open up access to higher education – especially for those combining work with study and for those with a disability or childcare responsibilities.

“Although there are digital divides, using digital media and online is an incredible way to reach people who would not otherwise benefit from higher education,” Blackman said.

Campbell of Spelman College said new forms of academic partnerships between public and private providers were needed for delivering higher education in future. “We have to get rid of the old marketing and competitive mode. That is not going to get us anywhere,” she said.

Marmolejo agreed, saying: “Colleges need to collaborate. Collaboration is different from cooperation. Cooperation is continuing to do the things you do, but with others! Collaboration is for both of you to do something new.”

Future of international higher education

As for the future of international higher education, Nelson suggested developing a scaled-down version of the Minerva approach in which students live and study in seven different countries during a four-year degree course.

Although this presented problems with some students stranded abroad during the COVID-19 lockdowns and travel disruption, Nelson said the teaching approach involving live video lectures and online tutorials to students around the world meant its learners were able to continue their studies throughout the crisis.

As a practical step, he suggested universities switch to a model where students spend the first year of their higher education course learning online “even if they live on campus” and then have their third year outside the campus in a different country.

“Using the same physical plant, universities could accommodate twice as many students. They could get real efficiency, lower the cost and make higher education more accessible to more people,” said Nelson.

Some imaginative thinking is urgently needed, he argued, as many of the estimated 70% of international students who returned home during the COVID-19 pandemic are not planning to go back and finish their studies.

“That could be a big hit for a country like Australia, where 40% of student enrolments are students from abroad.”

What is needed is a fresh approach to international higher education that challenges the assumption that the only way to get an international higher education experience is to go abroad.

“Call it internationalisation at home or virtual mobility or whatever, but embed internationalisation in all students.

“After we have a vaccine we can return to some sort of normal, but clearly we don’t expect to return to the same sort of normal,” said Nelson.

Nic Mitchell is a British-based freelance journalist and PR consultant who runs De la Cour Communications and blogs about higher education for the European Universities Public Relations and Information Officers’ Association, EUPRIO, and on his website. He also provides English-language communication support for European universities and specialist higher education media.