Given the ongoing events and discussions around race, policing, and equity, our team at the Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative has been leaning into the necessary discomfort of learning and unlearning what we know about race in the United States. One step we are taking is reading and unpacking the lessons of Derald Wing Sue in his book Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race. Our goal is to better learn how to hold space for conversations about systemic racism, unlearn outdated concepts of race, and to learn about race-specific difficulties and misconceptions regarding race talk that are often avoided.

Join us in learning how we can use this text as a resource for improving how we facilitate dialogues around race and learn new ways to help everyone thrive. Wing Sue’s book promises to give “Concrete advice for educators and parents on approaching race in a new way”.

The global pandemic has put educational systems in the public spotlight. Many are asking, “do students think their...degrees are worth the cost when delivered remotely?” Rather than simply creating a dilemma for higher education, COVID-19 seems to have highlighted a growing shift in the needs of students, and the gap in services provided by academia.

“Information technology transforms industries by making scarce resources plentiful, forcing customers to rethink the value of established products.” Over the last 10 years, online courses, free or otherwise, have improved regarding fidelity, content, and accessibility. At the same time, employers are asking for more versatile skillsets, which can be achieved more and more by skills-based certifications as opposed to 4-year degrees. In this piece, the author suggests that higher education may have fallen into the same trap of the entertainment industry, conflating their model with their mission.

But, as with other massive shifts in industry, there is hope for better learning and better outcomes from reexamining how and why we teach.

Echoing challenges highlighted in the previous piece, this post by the Brookings Institute goes over the changing course of higher education. In the face of a pandemic, online courses that will not be going anywhere, and uncertainty around tuition structures, it is clear that traditional college models will need to adapt permanently.

All of these necessary changes underscore a very real set of opportunities, however. Higher education will have to become all the more accessible, and all the more affordable.

While opportunity and optimism are necessary in the face of disruption, we also need to prepare for difficulties and possible exploitations of a world in turmoil. Some of the shifts towards a more permanent online education system could result in wider education equality than we already see, higher costs to accommodate brick and mortar institutions that are losing funding, and hiring disparities for those that received most (or all) of their education online.

But, when society shifts, there are opportunities for the playing field to be leveled. The 10 sometimes bleak predictions of this blog piece are scary, yes, but they can also offer us something to strive against, to plan for and create a more sustainable and equitable system from the ground up. We shall see how the education market adapts or falls flat in the next year, but let this be a call for educators to remember their mission, regardless of the model.

While much of the current crises of the world make us feel isolated, there is a unique ability of humans to come together and find strength in community throughout disaster. It seems counter-intuitive, but adversity is often what breeds social improvement. “In a state of chaos… ‘self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside of group survival,’” as social beings, humanity does best when it remembers the group over the individual. This is articulated best by how we handle crises.

This insightful piece offers us an optimistic lens through which we can view the circumstances of the world. Through the social bonds formed in times of hardship, it becomes clear that “[i]t is possible for disasters to spark meaningful changes in the way we live.”