Modern Conception of Advising: Future students will be presented with ever-increasing complexity of choices. The current conception of student advising is not sustainable in that environment, and new tools for guiding students will be needed. As more course content is consumed online and more data are generated by the students who consume it, models that predict the outcomes of educational decisions will become more widely available. Advances in big data and analytics, improved technologies such as AI, virtual/augmented reality, and breakthroughs in cognitive science will be able to make use of this data and will certainly play a role in future advising.

Flexible Learning Experiences: Future Georgia Tech learners will be much more heterogeneous. Cookie-cutter templates will be harder to come by as students mix and match course content, credentials, and brand value to prepare themselves for jobs in industries that do not necessarily align well with stable disciplinary boundaries or recognizable curricula. A factory-like, assembly-line model of education will no longer be sufficient. Younger students may lack the depth of understanding or maturity of current college freshmen. Older students do not need the formative mentoring that is typical in undergraduate programs. Some students will benefit from associating with cohorts, while others need space and time alone. For many reasons, the Georgia Tech Commitment will make flexible learning experiences a top priority.

Intense Learning: There are many avenues available to learners who want to expand their educational experiences outside the traditional bounds of higher education. TED™ Talks, free massive open online courses (MOOCs), training videos, book clubs, and discussion groups organized around specialized topics are all modern-day incarnations of the early twentieth century Chautauqua, the traveling tent shows that moved across the plains of the American Midwest to bring interesting lectures, performances, and novel cultural experiences to families that otherwise would have had little access to the great ideas of the day. The modern Chautauqua expands educational experiences undertaken for enrichment purposes. In the Georgia Tech Commitment, episodic learning experiences are intentional and marked by standards of achievement. Unlike simple enrichment and most other experiences outside traditional residential instruction, the Georgia Tech Commitment is marked by rigor and intensity of the sort needed to master complex material.

Sustainable Financial Models: Current methods of funding higher education are being strained to the breaking point. Tuition as a means of recovering the cost of education faces strong political and societal headwinds. Many institutions with large endowments thrive on increasingly selective admissions criteria that will ultimately affect their ability to address the same market as the Georgia Tech Commitment. The economics of this marketplace are poorly understood, but most analysts agree that transactional pricing (tuition per credit hour) is not a sustainable model. Value-based revenue generation (such as Georgia Tech’s online master’s degree programs) is innovative, and because it allows the Institute to reach new markets not currently served by higher education, it can be sustained into the foreseeable future. In other ways, however, all business models that rest on admission and enrollment in classes are at risk in a world where episodic education is the common mode of delivering value. New business models must address these realities.