In the face of financial shortfalls, many schools make a fundamental error: they focus on employment data to find new programs or current programs to grow. Unfortunately, there is a very limited relationship between employer needs and program margins.

Welcome to day two of our Posts on Emerging Programs. Today’s program is not quite as far out there on the spectrum of emerging programs as Quantum Computing.

Here we are in the middle of our series on Emerging Programs. Today I’ll share a program that’s truly on the cusp: unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs).

Thank you for joining me on this 5-day exploratory of Emerging Programs. We started pretty far out there and shared programs on the cusp; now we’re wrapping up this series with Esports, a program that’s already here and now for many higher-education institutions.

There is a good chance that you are losing potential students right from your own backyard. In the post-COVID world, online education is growing and the competition for student demand is intense.

Years before the pandemic, online enrollment began its rise. Using the most recent data from IPEDS through 2018 for on-campus fall enrollment, we discover a downward curve of three percent, year-over-year, since 2013. In contrast, there is a three-percent growth in online enrollment.

Just as the novel coronavirus has disrupted our lives, it is changing the societal context for higher education. More specifically, the programs students want and whether they want to take them online or on-campus have undergone massive changes, as have job options for interns Close up of businesswomen holding graphs in hand and graduates.

In the face of financial shortfalls, many schools make a fundamental error: they focus on employment data to find new programs or current programs to grow. Unfortunately, there is a very limited relationship between employer needs and program margins.

Short, strong, with the sweet aftertaste of a data-informed insight: that is GrayData: Espresso,GrayData Espresso Blogour new blog. It will focus on brief, bi-weekly, data-informed posts on trends in student demand and employer needs.

We have a great deal to be optimistic about in higher education. For one, most state budgets didn’t fall much and the federal government just gave them billion dollar booster shots. The U.S. economy is poised for a boom, led by federal spending and pent-up consumer demand.