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Educators look into the future

• A week before classes start, university educators in Albany are aksed to assess who they must be to better serve a fast-changing student population.

Barbara Rivera Holmes

ALBANY — William Pepicello had but a few questions Monday for Albany State University faculty and staff: Who are the students? What are their needs?

“What is the lens that we need to look through?” asked Pepicello, president of the University of Phoenix, the country’s largest private university. “That lens that we need to look through is that of our students.”

The Brown University- educated Pepicello was the speaker at ASU’s two-day faculty and staff conference, which this year bears the theme of the university’s new brand, “Potential. Realized.”

“We’re at a very critical point these days,” said Pepicello, whose for-profit organization, established in 1989, has an enrollment of 300,000 students who take classes online and in brick- and-mortar classrooms in 42 states. “We can’t do it harder and faster. We have to do it differently.”

In order for institutions to survive, thus for students to thrive, schools must change their ways, Pepicello said. It’s pivotal, he said, to integrate “education into the lives of students who don’t just see themselves as students.

“The key to retaining students is knowing who our students are,” he said.

Whereas once students in college had one job — to be a student — an increasing number of today’s students are nontraditional, that is, they have full-time positions, they have families. And, he said, they live a portion of their lives virtually, plugged in to this gadget or logged on to that Web site.

“This generation leads a life that is significantly different,” said Pepicello. “A 20th-century philosophy won’t work in the 21st century.”

That’s a point traditional institutions are learning.

“We don’t own students,” said ASU President Everette Freeman, at whose request Pepicello came to Albany. “What we want to do is make as many options available to the students.”

The traditional approach to education has been molding students to fit the profile that schools are accustomed to serving.

The challenge today, the administrators said, is to tailor the educational experience to meet the needs of a population whose demographics are constantly changing.

“Higher education is the only business that tells the consumer how to do it, when do it and what to do,” Pepicello told the crowd of educators gathered at ASU’s ACAD Auditorium for his 11 a.m. talk.

Freeman said the university’s goal is to meld the traditional approach to education with the creative and versatile.

“It’s simple, but it’s not so easy,” he said.

Already students are demanding that institutions find alternate ways to deliver education, an evolution in higher learning that began about five years ago.

Over the next 10 years, Freeman said, students will put “a greater emphasis on ownership of the educational process than before.”

“Students will be less apt to be docile,” he said, “and more likely to be challenging and more likely to question what we provide.”

Albany State students start classes Aug. 14.

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