At the Chronicle’s Executive Leadership Forum, Jeffrey Zaslow spoke about Randy Pausch the Carnegie Mellon professor who was the subject of a Wall Street Journal column last fall.  Zaslow, a Carnegie Mellon alum and reporter for the WSJ, heard about Pausch’s lecture and received permission from his editor to cover it.  At the last minute, he decided to video some of the lecture and post it on the Journal’s website before the article was published.  In true Web 2.0 fashion, the video link was emailed, posted on YouTube and over 30 million people have seen it.

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One of the more stimulating conversations occurred during the recent Chronicle’s Executive Leadership Forum. “Will Your College Close in 2012: Surviving the Demographic Shift” was the topic and it was moderated by Travis Reindl, Program Director of Jobs for the Future. In the future, “fewer applicants will be white and fewer will be from New England” were the lead issues for comment from the panelists who included Sarita Brown, President of Excelencia in Education, Roger Goodman, Vice President at Moody’s Investor Services, and Dawn Terkla, Associate Provost at Tufts University. Brown commented on the leading trends in the Hispanic community, Goodman on the impact of enrollment declines in debt servicing capacity, and Terkla on the perspective of these trends from a highly selective institution. This topic was not too different from a topic presented at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting in San Diego in February which was titled “New Students: Who, What, Where, and When”. Demographics are shifting in higher education and we need to be prepared. Already, the number of males attending college has slipped below 50 percent nationwide. Given the trends, it’s a matter of time before the white enrollment is less than 50 percent as well. While these trends are certainly different for many residential colleges, distance education institutions have held higher enrolled percentages of women and minorities for years. That said, many of us will need to examine the relevance of our curriculums as the shift continues over the next few years.