Devin Keeler and Skip Notte on the Evolution of Higher Education
Vice Presidents and Education Market Leaders Devin Keeler and Skip Notte describe the changing environment of higher education and how Dewberry supports institutions in navigating these changes.
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There is a lot of change happening in the higher education market over the next few years. The big one is the demographic cliff or the enrollment cliff. So if you go back to 2007, in the Great Recession, we just started having less kids as Americans. Fast forward 18 years into 2025, we’re going to have 600,000 less 18-year-olds that are at the college age. So the way higher ed institutions respond to that challenge is going to dictate their success in the years beyond them. I think the reduction in the number of students applying to college is going to have a significant impact in admissions by changing the relationship between college admissions and the student. Up to this point, college admissions really held the upper hand. As we move forward, I think we're going to see a shift going the other way, where colleges are going to start extending a lot of acceptance for admission into their university. That’s going to give students an upper hand as they try to make a decision on where do they want to spend their money and where do they want to spend the next four years of their life. Colleges are going to have to change and change with the goal of attracting more students. And so I can really see three possible ways that they do that. They really emphasize the value that the degree provides and try to reduce costs, make it as high ROI as possible, and emphasizing that to the students. The second way would be colleges where students see their values being lived by that college. Talking about sustainability, carbon neutrality, climate change, and DE&I type issues. If they see themselves in that environment, they’ll be more apt to choose that school. And the third thing colleges can do would be to embrace new degree programs as a means to grow their student population. And so I'm talking about things like AI, machine learning, autonomous vehicles, any cutting edge new trend or technology that maybe doesn't have a degree program today, but they craft that new degree program, that’s going to be a great means for them to attract new students. At Dewberry, we have been fortunate enough to be able to partner with these colleges and universities in this evolutionary process. If you're looking at return on investment, colleges are really going to try to cut costs where they can, and when you look at future projects, is that maybe changing the delivery of the project? Do they look to privatize some of their existing campus infrastructure so they're no longer required to pay those large unexpected projects? In cultural alignment, maybe they're looking to go carbon neutral, green grid, things that will help align with climate change discussions and what may be going on in the entire world. In the third part, that cutting edge, we are fortunate enough to be partnering with colleges on autonomous vehicle parks, hyperloops, data centers, high-end data centers that are used to not only store data, but actually crunch massive projects in the big data world. What we'll also see is that all of this starts with the colleges understanding what they have. Where are we starting from? What is that baseline for us to then continue this evolution to support these students? That baseline is asset management, and we've been working with a lot of these higher education institutions to help them understand what do they have and what can they do with it.