Time To Play Catch Up

I've been paying a lot of attention to the hand-wringing in higher education and noticed that some progressive universities seem genuinely excited about reinventing themselves. Lot's of pronouncements about non-credit credential, accelerated degrees, eight-week terms, and partnerships with employers. Not surprising (a least not to some of us), these are the universities that are picking up the playbook that professional continuing education (PCE) units have been running, with varying levels of success, for decades. The irony here is that PCE divisions weren't sitting around waiting for a demographic cliff or a federal earnings test to start asking hard questions about relevance. They've been continually evolving because their students have always demanded outcomes, not credit hours. The best PCE units have already built the stackable credentials, industry partnerships, and flexible scheduling that some university administers are now fawning over.

Progressive universities are giving their PCE units more room to move faster, price flexibly, and freedom to rapidly build programs in weeks instead of years. They are compressing time to degree, embedding microcredentials, and rethinking the academic calendar itself. These are the things that PCE units have been doing since before "workforce alignment" was a buzzword.  PCE units are a living proof of concept sitting right inside the institution. The universities smart enough to treat them as a resource and replicable model rather than a margin item on the expense report have a significant head start. The rest will spend the next decade rediscovering what their PCE colleagues figured out years ago, then call it innovation.