Episode

12 Oct 2021 · 32 min

0:00

In this Future You podcast episode, hosts Michael Horn and Jeff Selingo interview Greg Fowler, president of the University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC), to explore how COVID‑19 is reshaping higher education, especially for online‑first institutions. Fowler recounts his career trajectory—from Six Flags to the National Endowment for the Humanities, Western Governors University, SNHU, and finally UMGC—highlighting his focus on competency‑based education, micro‑credentials, and serving military learners worldwide. The conversation covers (1) the pandemic’s durable effects on online institutions, (2) the difficulty of “unlearning” established online models and the need for dual transformation (core business plus autonomous innovation units), (3) practical changes at UMGC such as remote work, rethinking office space, and expanding services for civilian and military students, (4) the rise of short‑term credentials versus traditional degrees and the financial implications for large online providers, (5) the broader higher‑ed labor conversation—faculty workload, research‑teaching balance, and the lack of faculty‑level dialogue about mission, (6) the problem of institutional isomorphism driven by Carnegie classifications, and the hosts’ effort to develop a new, non‑hierarchical taxonomy of colleges, (7) the importance of clarifying institutional mission and what “student‑centered” truly means, and (8) reflections on whether the pandemic is a catalyst that merely accelerates pre‑existing trends rather than fundamentally redirecting the sector. Throughout, the hosts and Fowler balance optimism about innovation with caution about entrenched structures.

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