The External Environment
The key external forces forcing change on UGA over the next decade will include the following:
TECHNOLOGY
The revolution in the "knowledge industries" is truly Copernican in scope. Clearly the new information and communications technology will change everything we do at the University of Georgia over the next decade, though no one knows exactly how.
The digital revolution driving societal change is as significant as the invention of the printing press on the Industrial Revolution. Since the introduction of the transistor and the integrated circuit, people have not just been doing things differently; they have been doing vastly different things. Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab describes it as the difference between atoms and bits. Atoms are about physical things and bits are about intangible information. As the emphasis shifts from one to the other, almost every aspect of society is altered.
In manufacturing, business, and finance, such structural change has already transformed workplaces and marketplaces. In research, developments in areas such as molecular biology and computational finance (fields which owe their existence to information technology) are generating an explosion in which knowledge in some fields is doubling every five years. Now universities, always grounded in information, stand at a digital crossroads, confronted with a rapidly changing environment and a growing realization that ignoring change is no longer an option. The challenge facing higher education is to prepare for an uncertain future and to provide a technology-rich environment where students can obtain the continuously changing knowledge and skills needed to shape that future.
Over the next decade, many research universities will assess broadening their current student clientele to include degrees, courses, certifications, and training made more easily available and customized through information technology. Competing for students, faculty, and especially financial resources in this environment will require a richer vision of education and a restructuring of the organizations, strategies and policies required to achieve it.
As a traditional, resident-based university, the positioning of the University of Georgia needs to be one of responsiveness to new technological opportunities, while increasing the quality of our face-to-face, in-and out-of-class instruction and interaction with students: We must become more like the residential liberal arts college we once were, while providing both technological and curricular options for on-line course work for those who prefer that mode. We must provide "connectivity" via electronic ports or wireless at every seat and bed in the University, and "24/7" support for all users, and we need to be fully alert to the new kinds of alliances and out-sourcing strategies that may prove to be the most effective way of financing the substantial costs of such high quality connectivity and support.
DEMOGRAPHICS
The number of high school graduates will increase steadily in Georgia until 2009 (from 68,000 in 1999 to 90,000 or so), when those numbers will begin to decline, so UGA's traditional base of students will continue to grow until then. Georgia itself will grow to roughly 9.5 to 10 million people by 2010 (from its current 7.6 million), and tax revenues should continue to grow along with that population growth.
Black population will grow from 28% to 33% (3 million) by 2010. Latino growth will continue apace, and by 2010 will be 770,000, roughly 7% of the population.
In general, most developed countries outside the U.S. will decline steadily in population over the century; some, such as Italy and Japan, by more than two-thirds. The U.S. population will continue to grow until roughly 2025 (mostly by virtue of the high birth rates of recent immigrant groups and blacks), and then begin to decline. The entire growth after 2015 will be in people 55 years and older.
There will be a sharp drop in the labor force of traditional age (i.e., below 65) throughout the developed world after 2025. Older people, past traditional retirement age, will outnumber young people for the first time in recorded history.
UGA will be increasingly challenged to respond imaginatively to new emerging student markets including Black, Latino, and older students, in both its undergraduate and graduate programs, and it may need to develop new program offerings to reach these markets, including greatly increased offerings through continuing and distance education.
COMPETITION
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that "within little more than five years, postsecondary proprietary education has been transformed from a sleepy sector of the economy, best known for its mom-and-pop schools, to a $3.5-billion-a-year business that is increasingly dominated by companies building regional and even national franchises.
Competition from for-profit schools such as the University of Phoenix; on-line course providers (which will be legion), such as HungryMinds.com, which went live in December 1999 with 24,000 courses; local schools moving in to share UGA's common party areas (downtown Athens, Sanford Stadium, etc.) such as Piedmont College, Truett McConnell, and Athens Tech; and USG schools now offering our degrees, such as the expansion of the EdD Degree to Valdosta State, Georgia Southern, West Georgia and Fort Valley (and through them to three other USG schools) all will require UGA to focus more precisely on its markets to compete successfully.
Outsourcing of various management functions and services is increasing on campuses all around the country. While the contracting of food services, housing, bookstore, parking and custodial services is quite common, many colleges are finding new opportunities for partnerships in providing services, including facilities, property and real estate management, and on-line and web-based delivery of coursework.
One factor of the accelerated level of competition in higher education will undoubtedly be a whole new focus on the quality of "customer service" schools provide - and a more sophisticated understanding of who the customers are. In today's and tomorrow's marketplace, characterized by shortages of "knowledge workers," two-professional-wage-earner families and family mobility, faculty and staff are just as much "customers" as students are, and will need to be treated as such to be retained.
Such competition will demand that UGA become more flexible to prosper. It is expected that the average student's transcript will increasingly include courses from across the provider spectrum, in particular from across the on-line spectrum, within a very few years. (It is estimated that roughly 10 to 20% of each graduating student's credit hours will be earned via the Internet by 2010, and that very few of those credit hours will be generated by Georgia institutions. In current dollars, this would cost the University of Georgia, unless it is getting paid for those credit hours, some $60 million a year.) Some are suggesting that universities will become "degree-granting-bodies" or DGBs, in the near future, making degree decisions over collections of courses from hundreds of providers.
Whether UGA students are on-campus or on-line taking courses elsewhere, they will still be dependent on UGA for advising, health care, parking, food and so on; accounting for what universities do by "credit hour production" will be a less and less useful measurement, and residency requirements for graduation may be dramatically revised or abandoned altogether.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
There are enormous increases in the expectations by state leaders of universities to contribute directly to economic development initiatives designed to improve the economic well-being of the state, and substantial rewards available for institutions who do so (the Yamacraw Mission and the "One Georgia" project are two such recent initiatives). UGA's ability to position itself to help shape and take advantage of this role needs strengthening, and is vital to its future.
This intensification of expectation by the governmental and business sectors of the state must be met by a quickening response at UGA, which by its very character as a land-grant, sea-grant university is committed to focusing its myriad resources on the economic needs of Georgia's citizens, young and old, rich and poor, rural and urban.
GLOBALISM
While the Internet makes all institutions and businesses capable of being and having global competitors, easy transportation continues to make international markets increasingly common and important. The major traditional businesses and economic institutions of Georgia are "going global" at a pace only slightly less jarring than the increasing number of Internet-based businesses that are global almost by definition. The multicultural world in which our students will live, get jobs and socialize is already evident in the "Chambodia" section of Atlanta, aptly and accurately illustrated by Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full.
The centrality of international activity in the economic, political, intellectual and recreational dimensions of Georgia demands a dramatically higher level of response from the state of Georgia's "flagship" university.
GOVERNANCE
The management complexity of the 34 institutions in the University System of Georgia, governed by a single Board of Regents, is a considerable challenge to the University of Georgia. As the state's largest and most comprehensive institution, with an annual budget in excess of $1billion, it chafes uncomfortably at times in a "system" which issues policies and develops budgets in harness with schools with annual budgets smaller than UGA's Department of Music. UGA is also often encumbered by fiscal, business and management restrictions of the state or Regents' offices (e.g., year-end carry-over policies; capital construction management) which need to be streamlined to encourage greater entrepreneurial creativity and more efficient use of resources. At the same time, UGA needs to find ways to become a more effective partner to the Regents office for helping guide higher education policy in Georgia, particularly in ways that benefit research and its role in the state's future economic development.
Updated 12/09/2000
