Through disruptions, higher ed faces questions, opportunities - Greg St. Martin, Northeastern

“It would have been impos­sible in 1969 to really foresee the world that we live in today and the jobs that exist as a result of those changes,” Bacow said. “So, if someone said in 1969 that they wanted to be a web designer, you’d say ‘What?’” Bacow’s com­ments came as part of a panel dis­cus­sion with North­eastern Pres­i­dent Joseph E. Aoun and Susan Hock­field, the former pres­i­dent of the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nology, who exam­ined the future of higher edu­ca­tion at a time of height­ened scrutiny and fun­da­mental change. Bacow stressed the impor­tance of being modest in our capacity to pre­dict the future, which means edu­cating stu­dents to be pre­pared for a world that will soon look dif­ferent than it does today, one in which the only con­stant is change, and one in which “they are going to increas­ingly be called upon at ever shorter inter­vals to reed­u­cate themselves.” http://www.northeastern.edu/news/2016/09/through-disruptions-higher-ed-faces-questions-opportunities/