Change in higher education is no longer optional.
Student expectations are shifting. Technology is changing how we teach, learn, and work. Employers are reassessing the skills and credentials they value. Families are questioning the cost of a college education. Institutions themselves are facing demographic and financial pressures that make it increasingly difficult to continue operating exactly as they have for decades.
That does not mean everything about higher education is broken, or that everything traditional should be discarded.
But continuing to do something simply because “this is how we have always done it” is becoming harder to defend.
Across the country, institutions are experimenting with very different approaches to change. Some are making sweeping structural changes. Others are building entirely new models. Many more are making smaller adjustments within existing programs and courses.
All these approaches have a place.
At Brandeis University, President Arthur Levine is pursuing change on a large scale.
Brandeis has launched what it calls its Plan to Reinvent the Liberal Arts, supported initially by a $25 million investment from its Board of Trustees. The university is reorganizing its academic structure, integrating career preparation more deliberately into the student experience, expanding experiential learning, creating a Center for Careers and Applied Liberal Arts, and developing a competency-based “second transcript” designed to communicate what students can actually do, not simply which courses they completed.
Beginning in their first semester, students are being paired with both academic and career advisers. The university is also working to identify competencies developed through coursework, internships, research, and other experiences so graduates have a clearer way to communicate those capabilities to employers and graduate schools.
That is a major institutional undertaking.
A different experiment is taking shape in Montpelier, Vermont.
The Greenway Institute is developing a new undergraduate engineering institution built around project-based education and work-integrated learning. Its model calls for students to spend part of their four years in hands-on residential education and part working in paid positions that are integrated into the curriculum.
Greenway is also deliberately trying to reduce some of the overhead associated with the traditional residential college model. The institution plans to invest heavily in teaching, mentoring, projects, and employment experience while avoiding many of the amenities and services that drive up institutional costs.
Its stated goal is simple: “A degree. A job. No debt.”
Brandeis is trying to redesign an existing university. Greenway has the advantage of starting with a blank sheet of paper.
Most of us working in higher education have neither opportunity.
We are not going to create a new university. We may not be able to reorganize our college, replace the curriculum, or redesign the institution’s financial model.
We can still make changes.
Sometimes the right intervention is a new institution. Sometimes it is a new degree. Sometimes it is a revised course.
And sometimes it is a small change in how we help students understand what they have learned.
Start With the Student Experience
In our professionally oriented online graduate programs, we spend considerable time thinking about curricular relevance.
One challenge is deciding what should actually be taught in fields that change quickly.
Take social media.
We could teach students precisely which buttons to click to create an advertisement on a particular platform. That knowledge might be useful today, but the platform will change. The interface will change. The advertising tools will change. Some of today’s dominant platforms may eventually disappear altogether.
So we try to focus instead on capabilities that have a longer shelf life.
How do you identify an audience?
How do you develop a strategy?
How do you establish measurable objectives?
How do you interpret audience behavior?
How do you determine whether a campaign worked?
How do you use evidence to decide what to do next?
The technology will continue to evolve. Those capabilities are likely to remain useful.
As we reviewed our programs, however, we noticed another issue.
Students could be doing sophisticated graduate-level work involving analytics, research, strategy, and measurement, yet still struggle when it came time to update a résumé, write a cover letter, build a LinkedIn profile, or answer an interviewer who asked, “What can you do?”
The academic work was strong. The translation into professional language was not always as clear.
For a professionally oriented graduate program, that is a problem worth addressing.
Not every academic program exists primarily to prepare students for a particular job, nor should it. Higher education serves intellectual, civic, scientific, cultural, and developmental purposes that extend far beyond employment.
Professional programs, however, make a more explicit promise. Students enroll in substantial part because they expect the experience to increase their professional capabilities and opportunities.
If students leave knowing more and being able to do more, but cannot explain those capabilities to an employer, we have left part of the job unfinished.
So we made a small change.
From Learning Outcomes to Professional Language
Consider our graduate course Social Media Metrics and Evaluation.
In the course, students collect and analyze authentic social media campaign data and determine the appropriate methods for measuring performance. They identify data points that help clarify campaign effectiveness, analyze results, and determine how those findings should influence future strategy.
By the end of the course, students are expected to be able to:
• Analyze social media data, audience behaviors, and platform performance using appropriate analytical frameworks.
• Develop strategic social media campaign objectives aligned with organizational and audience goals.
• Design comprehensive measurement plans using KPIs, benchmarking, attribution, and performance metrics.
• Apply social listening, sentiment analysis, and audience intelligence techniques to evaluate engagement, trends, and campaign effectiveness.
• Evaluate social media analytics tools, dashboards, AI-supported analytics systems, and measurement methodologies.
• Measure and interpret social media campaign performance to support strategic decision-making and optimization.
• Create professional analytics reports, dashboards, and executive-level recommendations using data-driven insights.
Those are meaningful professional capabilities.
But course learning outcomes are not usually written in the language of a résumé.
So at the end of the course, students now see an additional section:
Resume Skills: You’ve Earned Them
Students are encouraged to consider incorporating accomplishments such as these into their résumés, LinkedIn profiles, and professional portfolios:
• Analyzed social media data, audience behavior, and platform performance to evaluate campaign effectiveness and support strategic decision-making.
• Developed campaign measurement plans using key performance indicators, benchmarking, attribution models, and performance metrics aligned with organizational objectives.
• Applied social listening, sentiment analysis, audience intelligence, and influencer analytics to identify trends, evaluate engagement, and optimize communication strategies.
• Created executive dashboards, analytics reports, and data visualizations that translated complex social media data into actionable business recommendations.
• Evaluated AI-supported analytics tools, predictive technologies, and ethical considerations to improve measurement practices and inform future campaign strategies.
We did not rebuild the course.
We did not create a new credential.
We did not require a committee, a reorganization, or a major new investment.
We identified a gap between what students were learning and their ability to communicate that learning outside the classroom, then added something that could help close it.
Making Learning Visible
There is an interesting connection between this small change and what Brandeis is attempting with its second transcript.
Brandeis wants students to leave with a record of competencies developed through courses, internships, research, and other experiences. A traditional transcript might tell someone that a student completed a particular course and earned an A.
It says much less about what the student can actually do.
Our approach is far simpler, but it addresses a similar problem.
A transcript tells an employer that a student completed Social Media Metrics and Evaluation.
It does not automatically tell that employer that the student can design a measurement plan, analyze audience behavior, conduct social listening, interpret campaign data, build an executive dashboard, or turn analytics into strategic recommendations.
Those capabilities may be embedded in the course, but they are easy to lose once they are reduced to a course title and grade.
Universities can do a better job of helping students make their learning visible.
Match the Change to the Problem
There is no single correct scale for change in higher education.
Some problems are structural. They require new business models, new academic structures, significant investment, changes in governance, or a willingness to challenge long-standing institutional practices.
Other problems are much narrower and can be addressed inside a program, a course, or even a single assignment.
Money matters. Leadership matters. Institutional culture matters. Faculty and staff support matter. Student needs matter. The urgency of the problem matters.
A large overhaul is not automatically more valuable because it is large.
A small change is not automatically more practical simply because it is easier.
The goal should be to identify the problem clearly and make the change that best addresses it.
We should be paying attention to institutions such as Brandeis and Greenway. Their experiments may help show what different versions of higher education could look like in the years ahead.
But we should not become so focused on large-scale reinvention that we overlook what can be improved inside our own areas of responsibility.
Look at a program.
Look at a course.
Look at the student experience.
Where is there friction?
Where are students struggling?
Where is the institution doing something because it has always done it that way?
Where is there a gap between what students need and what we currently provide?
Then decide what scale of change the problem actually requires.
Sometimes the answer may be a new institutional model.
Sometimes it may be a complete redesign of a program.
And sometimes it may be five bullet points at the bottom of a course.
Higher education needs all of it.
One opportunity I think both higher education and employers overlook is recognizing the value of academic learning before graduation.
We tend to treat a degree as an on/off switch on a résumé. You either have the credential or you don't.
But what about the working adult halfway through a degree who has already completed coursework in leadership, financial analysis or project management? That knowledge doesn't suddenly become relevant on graduation day.
Colleges should help students translate what they're learning into résumé content, interview conversations and career advancement opportunities throughout their education.
But employers and leaders have a role, too. In my experience, interviewers rarely explore what candidates are currently learning or how they're applying it. And how often do managers take a vested interest in the degrees, certifications or new skills their employees are pursuing?
Some organizations even help pay for that education. But are they connecting that investment to opportunities for employees to apply what they're learning, contribute in new ways or advance professionally?
Supporting education is one thing. Recognizing and leveraging that learning is another.
And neither should have to wait until graduation.