Ray Schroeder's latest Inside Higher Ed column deserves to land harder than it probably will at most private universities. I've known and admired Ray for years. His guidance and perspectives as a Senior Fellow with UPCEA are invaluable to those of us operating in the PCE space.
In this article, Ray suggests that professional and continuing education was once the least-respected unit on campus, but that it's now poised to be the most essential. Ray's argument is built on the reality that rapidly expanding technologies, such as AI, are dismantling the foundational premise of the traditional college degree. The adult learners navigating this upheaval need what well-resourced professional and continuing education (PCE) colleges deliver. And yet most mid-tier tuition-dependent private universities are still under-leveraging and under-funding their PCE units.
The structural case for PCE colleges is fundamental and operational. Traditional schools and colleges cannot serve adult learners, career changers, and working professionals effectively because their governance structures, disciplinary boundaries, and cultural assumptions make rapid innovation nearly impossible. Take, for example, the Bachelor of Professional Studies model which is built on 75% professionally focused credits, credit for prior learning, and direct alignment to career outcomes. A degree structured this way can't be delivered through a traditional school or college that guards its course distribution requirements or claims ownership of the major credits. Only a dedicated unit, free from disciplinary nonsense, can respond to labor market changes at competitive speed, and maintain the institutional infrastructure for microcredentials, corporate billing, non-matriculated registration, and digital badging that the workforce education market now demands.
The PCE college is the only academic unit on most campuses that's architecturally designed to do this work. Some private universities get it. Some don't. Those that have systematically underfunded, misunderstood, or organizationally sidelined their PCE colleges typically do so as an act of preserving some noble vision of higher education. Their senior leaders are desperately white-knuckling the stick on a rapidly shortening runway, refusing to resource the one unit capable of keeping their institutions relevant as the world Ray describes accelerates around them.
The demographic cliff has been getting all the attention. The competency cliff doesn't. The workforce that needs continuous reskilling is now a permanent condition. Georgetown already knows this. Northeastern already knows this. Northwestern already knows this. The private universities still treating their PCE college like a satellite campus for non-traditional part-time students will figure it out around the same time they're explaining to their board why eighteen-year-old applications are down again and nothing they've tried is working.
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