New Educational Institution 

Higher education, particularly at the four-year undergraduate level, faces challenges on many fronts today, including cost, value, equity, and relevance.

Academia would be well served to confront these challenges and shape new models to ensure that the attributes that make education valuable are preserved as academia evolves. We believe that there is a fundamental difference between education and training, between a job skill and a life skill, and between operating and creating.

If academia leaves a vacuum, the solutions that emerge will likely blur these lines, and society will be the poorer for it. However, the runway is limited. The economic model of educational institutions, precarious to begin with, is hardly popular with students, parents, and the media. COVID caused a further disruption; remote education replaced the in-person teaching out of necessity during the pandemic, but tuition fees were not generally reduced.

This highlighted a question that will linger for years after the pandemic: If remote education is worth the tuition, then what is the worth of college?

The question we address in our white paper is how educational institutions can evolve alternate models that can overcome some of these challenges.