Students and Educators Need Permission to Be Individuals

The idea that someone can earn a degree at 22 and be set for a career is as outdated as a pocket watch. So how do we prepare students to do jobs that don't exist yet? To solve problems we can't imagine yet? To compete in industries and business models that haven't been invented yet?

Those questions were urgent when I first wrote about them after the pandemic shook every aspect of education. They are even more urgent now, because the half-life of skills keeps shrinking. What a student masters as a freshman can be overtaken by technology before graduation.

Most conversations about the future of higher education focus on institutions: budgets, enrollment, business models. But the future will be lived by individuals. Students and educators are the ones who have to live with this uncertainty, and they need something institutions have rarely offered them: permission to be individuals.

What This Means for Students

I have a daughter, and I often think about what her higher education experience will look like. I don't expect it to look like mine. I expect it to be designed around who she is, what she needs at each stage of her life and the work she will choose to do. I believe every student deserves that.

Higher education leaders keep pointing me to three shifts.

1. Access through technology. Technology can widen who gets to learn by lowering costs and reaching working adults and people who don't live near a leading institution.
2. Individualized learning. Learning is moving beyond the degree to certificates, digital credentials and focused programs. Learners can shape their education around the career needs they have now, then return when those needs change.
3. Flexibility by design. Programs have to be built intentionally for people balancing education with work and family.

Students will move between face-to-face, online and immersive learning environments throughout their lives. The most important thing they can learn is how to keep learning. That means learning, unlearning and relearning as the world changes around them.

What This Means for Educators

Faculty are living through the same uncertainty as their students, often with less support. Many are being asked to redesign courses, teach in new formats and advise students on careers that are changing faster than any syllabus can.

Educators are individuals too. Each brings distinct expertise, curiosity and ways of connecting with students. Institutions that standardize every aspect of teaching lose those strengths. Institutions that invest in faculty as individuals, giving them room to experiment and the training to grow, create the conditions for students to thrive.

Hard technical skills become outdated quickly. What endures is the ability to think conceptually, adapt, collaborate and create. Educators can't teach those capabilities from a script. They have to model them.

That also changes the role itself. The educator of the future is less a gatekeeper of content and more a guide, coach and advocate. Technology can deliver information on demand. It can't recognize the student who is quietly losing confidence, or see a talent that the student hasn't yet noticed in themselves.

The Skill Beneath Every Other Skill

There's a skill I write about consistently: unleashing ourselves and unleashing others. It depends on two things. The permission to question, and the confidence to contribute to decisions. Both require people to know and trust their own insights, and to trust that it's safe to share those insights at school or at work.

This may be the most important thing higher education can teach, and it has to start with how institutions treat their own people. A faculty member who doesn't feel safe questioning a policy won't teach students to question assumptions. A student who is never invited into decisions about their own learning won't graduate with the confidence to contribute at work.

Having that confidence ourselves, and giving it to others, is a skill our workplaces desperately need.

Give Permission Before You Ask for Confidence

The president of a Catholic high school was a member of our consortium for three years. What mattered most to me was that he had the courage to apply what he learned in his own institution, and empowered his own students to help him and his leadership team redefine the future of their school. He gave permission first, and his students brought the confidence.

Leaders can start by asking faculty what support they need to teach in new ways, and then funding the answer. Faculty can invite students to help shape one assignment around their own goals. Students can map the skills they want to build, not only the courses they need to take. And everyone can help create one forum where questioning a long-standing practice is welcomed, not merely tolerated.

Don't Rebuild the Old Model

Higher education has been through a great deal in recent years. Leaders face a choice: drive change, follow quickly or become irrelevant. The worst outcome would be to rebuild what has been done for centuries and miss the opportunity to evolve.

The future of higher education belongs to institutions that see every student and every educator as an individual with something distinct to contribute. That belief is at the center of Leadership in the Age of Personalization.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.