California College Guide : Into the 21st Century : Trends: Funding and technology will have an impact on how institutions attract and educate students. But experts disagree about the scope of the changes.

Imagine the Class of 2013.

The very notion may send students into reveries of flying across campuses via jet-pack to classes with robots as lab assistants. It may tantalize educators with visions of how universities will prepare a more diverse American population for a post-industrial economy. Or it might shock parents of toddlers into planning for steep tuition bills of the future. Scenarios of what lies ahead for American higher education differ widely. But behind the worries and predictions, trends are in place to affect the style, content, size, cost and location of college learning in the 21st Century.

The most important questions, experts say, involve demographics, funding and technology: Will rising population and larger numbers of minorities dramatically change higher education? Will the harsh austerities of the recession continue, along with the consumer demand that higher tuition buy better teaching? Will computer and video advances revolutionize college learning, making traditional campuses and lectures obsolete?

The diversity of opinion on these matters reflects the diversity in American higher education itself. There are 3,400 degree-granting institutions in the United States, ranging from tiny community colleges to vast corporation-like systems such as the University of California, with its hospitals and nuclear research labs. And academia, by its nature, produces debate.

James B. Appleberry, president of the American Assn. of State Colleges and Universities, predicts that “the education delivery system is going to change dramatically” because of technology, such as interactive videos. Instead of being mainly purveyors of information, professors will concentrate more on helping students learn how to use and make sense of all the data available electronically, he said. Increasingly, computer-aided learning will occur at the workplace, home and at satellites of central campuses, he said.

Appleberry also predicts that the traditional teaching style of formal lectures and tests will die off. “We’re going to find a much more interactive learning style and a much more interactive style of teaching,” he said.

UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young, on the other hand, contends that such predictions exaggerate the potential of technology, which he believes will be supplemental, not central. “I don’t see anything coming in to replace the lecture, replace the seminar, replace the laboratory,” Young said. “I don’t think we will see basic changes in those areas or dramatic changes in what we will be teaching in the next 25 years. We haven’t seen much in the past 25 years.”

There is agreement, however, that changing demographics will alter college life.

Since the late 1970s, the national population of recent high school graduates has declined about 15% and even more sharply in parts of the Northeast and Midwest. But enrollment at colleges and universities rose by about the same percentage in the 1980s to about 13.9 million, according to federal statistics. That was accomplished mainly through efforts to recruit older students and part-timers.

Some experts believe that 21st-Century colleges will push harder to enroll senior citizens in degree or non-credit programs, even building retirement communities on or near campuses for aging baby boomers.

“You can only bounce your grandchildren on your lap so much,” said George Keller, chairman of the higher education program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. He speculates that colleges may change “from being a training ground for youth into more like a great public library” for young and old.

Meanwhile, as many offspring of baby boomers approach college age, the traditional cohort of college-age students is expected to grow. That could mean more enrollment pressures on U.S. colleges and universities, particularly at public institutions in the West and Sun Belt. Using those projections, the UC and Cal State systems are planning to build new campuses.

But there is a big question mark within that resumed demographic growth. A large part of the increase in the youth population will be among minorities, especially Latinos. Yet Latinos and African-Americans, while showing improvements, finish high school and attend colleges at rates significantly lower than Anglos and Asian-Americans.

The continuing shift in the economy away from low-skill industrial jobs is expected to make a college degree more important than ever. So American academia will try to recruit more so-called underrepresented minorities, a step that may produce changes on campuses.

“Demographics will force American higher education to be even more adept at handling students with diverse cultural, linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds,” D. Bruce Johnstone, chancellor of the State University of New York, recently wrote.

The demand for adding more non-European materials to university curricula will continue as more students from non-European backgrounds enroll, many professors say. Their rising numbers could overwhelm opposition to multiculturalism in the next century, some say.

Yet whether future college readings are in Plato or in Toni Morrison, there are troubling questions about how well elementary and high schools are preparing students for those assignments. Robert G. Cameron, senior research associate at the College Board, the organization that sponsors college entrance examinations, believes that colleges will have to devote greater resources to remedial work as more students arrive with a limited grasp of English or with poor high school educations.

“That means some redefinitions of standards in higher education,” Cameron said. Some colleges, he says, will wind up doing what high schools did in the past.

The recession has wrought departmental closings and other austerities throughout academia, even at such elite and wealthy schools as Yale University and Columbia University. Large numbers of faculty layoffs might be ahead at public universities in California. If the economy improves, such cutbacks may be avoided, but forecasters do not foresee a return to the go-go expansion mentality in higher education over the next two decades.

A. Kenneth Pye, president of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, predicts that more private colleges will close or be absorbed into state institutions. The main reason, he contends, is federally funded financial aid is inadequate and middle-income families will find it increasingly difficult to afford private school tuition.

Schools will drop some programs to concentrate on what each does best. That will mean less duplication and more sharing of resources among schools. “All universities should not be trying to do the same thing,” said Pye, who is attempting to form a consortium of north Texas schools from which a student could take any course not offered at his home campus.

Other educators see much higher fees ahead at public colleges as state funds dwindle. “I don’t think we have begun to imagine how far this is going to go,” said Alexander Astin, director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA.

Yet Astin and others say some good could come of such money woes. Public and private schools, they say, will have to improve undergraduate education to attract tuition dollars.

“I think one of the inevitable realities of this kind of pressured environment is that people are going to be increasingly concerned about what they are going to get. It will be increasingly important for institutions to do an extremely good job with their students,” said Peter Buchanan, president of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, a Washington-based organization.

Debates over technology, demographics and money are likely to last well into the 21st Century.

American higher education in the future “will be just a little larger, a bit leaner in per-student costs, and even more diverse in student profiles and more technologically oriented than at the start of the present decade,” said Johnston of the State University of New York. “In its basic structure and degree configuration, in the way professors teach and students learn, and in its prominent role within American society, colleges and universities at the turn of the millennium will look much as they did a decade or two earlier.”

On the other hand, Keller at the University of Pennsylvania predicts that economic and other pressures will bring great changes to higher education. Even the system of academic departments may become antique.

“A lot of the intellectual inquiries today don’t fit into the divisions and categories that grew up in the 19th Century,” Keller said. “So we’ll see a lot of restructuring of the things we’ve taken for granted.”

Where They Go To College

Although total enrollment in higher education has grown, the distribution of students in the various types of institutions in the U.S. has remained somewhat steady. Here is the percentage of enrollment by type of institution from 1972-1990.

Note: Private 2-year schools have had approximately 1% of the total enrollment over the years.

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics, U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, March Current Population Survey.

Racial/Ethnic Enrollment

Between 1976 and 1990, college student bodies grew more diverse ethnically and racially. Here is the percentage of total enrollment in institutions of higher education, by race/ethnicity.

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics.