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In some respects, alma mater in Anno Domini 2000 will look pretty much the way she does now. "Madonna reinvents herself every season," is the dry observation of Sheldon Hackney, president of the University of Pennsylvania. "Universities are much more stable." Nonetheless, experts foresee quite a few changes -- good as well as bad -- for America's diverse complex of private and public institutions of higher learning. Items:
-- The small liberal-arts school with a meager endowment and a largely local reputation is an "endangered species," contends Diane Ravitch, an Assistant Secretary of Education. By the year 2000 some of these schools will have closed their doors or merged with larger, more stable schools. Meanwhile, new schools will open. Some will be two-year community colleges emphasizing service-oriented courses. Others may be small, publicly funded schools with innovative liberal-arts programs, like the University of South Florida's New College or Evergreen State College in Washington. And there will be much more intercollege cooperation, as neighboring schools share facilities and courses to avoid expensive and needless overlaps. The message: Cut costs, not throats.
-- Curriculums will show some radical departures from the past. To justify their existence as servants of society, all schools will come under pressure to be less theoretical and more practical in preparing students for careers. There will be more emphasis on ethics as well as on science and technology, particularly in courses aimed not at those who intend to major in chemistry or engineering but at liberal-arts majors who need at least some scientific literacy. Students will be under pressure to take two foreign languages, and there will be a growing emphasis on Chinese, Japanese and Russian. Academia's international horizons will broaden in other ways. Instead of a comfy junior year abroad in Paris or Perugia, many undergraduates will opt for more adventurous and exotic locales -- Eastern Europe, say, or Southeast Asia.
-- Great research-oriented universities like Harvard and Michigan, the pride of higher learning in America, will probably stay at world-class levels. But both the elite giants and less prestigious schools will place a stronger emphasis on the quality of classroom teaching. Professors accustomed to thinking of research as their real work will be under pressure to spend time with first- and second-year undergraduates as institutions adapt to an increasingly diverse academic population -- not just more women and minorities, but older students and part-timers with special needs. Even today, only 20% of the nation's undergraduates are young people between 18 and 22 who are pursuing a parent-financed education. Two-fifths of all students today are part-timers, and more than a third are over 25.