Lifetime learning is the study of a longitudinal perspective on an individual's teaching, learning, workforce development, and the resulting collective societal and economic impacts. The college will study the learning process throughout the lifetime as impacted by technology, economics, policy, geography, societal, and workforce needs. Faculty will apply their research knowledge in the design of programs to prepare students for a lifetime of continuous learning. The lessons learned from the teaching of these programs will further drive innovative research and, thus, new curricular innovations.

The unique opportunity to consider how various experiences, including formal and informal learning, impact one’s lifetime arc of engagement and growth is unparalleled.

The competencies of graduates of the new college’s programs will include learning methods and associated technologies, assessment strategies that measure strategy performance, organizational, design, and systems thinking, and policy implications.

We invite interested faculty to become involved with the college’s visioning, programs, and operations in the best way for them. These may include cross-listing existing courses, proposing new courses, certificates, or programs, collaborating on research projects, or requesting a joint appointment. We see roles for current Georgia Tech faculty and new hires and roles for tenure track, non-tenure track, and research faculty. The college’s faculty will be responsible for its governance (including RPT), curriculum development, and oversight. As the college takes shape, we anticipate opportunities for faculty to use existing and future professional development and online programs to gather data for their research.

The faculty owns the curriculum and courses. During the February 20, 2024, faculty session, an example of one idea to consider was shown for an M.S. in Learning Engineering – a topic that exemplifies this new emerging field using both existing Georgia Tech strengths while adding complementary courses. Graduates of such a program could be hired by companies and other organizations as chief learning officers, learning platform analysts, and other roles that are currently being sought by the industry. A group of Tech faculty are working to provide other example programs and potential courses and those can be found in the College of Lifetime Learning Proposal presentation shared during the March 28 Provost Town Hall. The concept is to gather the expertise across the Institute where and if the faculty chooses to do so. Then, new materials would be added to create the desired learning outcomes.

Degree programs will go through all Georgia Tech levels of faculty governance. The new programs would be designed for their intended market segment. We anticipate that the number of learners in the college’s degree programs, not likely to enroll students before the fall semester of 2026, will reach 100 students within three years. The college’s credit-bearing programs should be tied to research activities and, thus, would essentially be in residential settings so collaboration between faculty, staff, and students thrives.

To be effective and to meet industry demand, the lifetime learning vision requires the issuance of degree credentials, likely more than one degree and more than one type of credential. Thus, only two bodies, a college or a school, can do so at Georgia Tech. Other higher education organizations have different structures that can, but not at Tech.

• The academic discipline being created is new. While it seeks to collaborate with others across Georgia Tech, there isn’t a college with the totality of the new academic discipline, and indeed not the arc of early in one’s life to later stages of life, that C21U, CEISMC, and GTPE currently possesses. The size, complexity, and scope of this initiative are ill-suited for the structure of an interdisciplinary program.
• As one looks at other universities, organization structures that reach the audiences that GTPE does all report to the provost. Those units with school names do not have colleges in the university but are organized as schools. Examples include even named units with donor support. Many of these units also issue degrees at their university. Thus, the creation of a college is not new across peer universities.
• The Division of Lifetime Learning reports to the provost to engender the Institute’s broad interactions. This initiative seeks to grow resources for everyone at Georgia Tech. Thus, reporting to the provost is not just appropriate but needed. Budget models provide funding from the Institute and the provost to the colleges—to be effective, this same strategy should exist.
• The collection of C21U (a research center), CEISMC (a research and outreach center), and GTPE, an academic division, reach thousands of learners each year across the lifetime spectrum and issue credentials currently as Georgia Tech non-credit certificates of course completion or certificates of program completion, per the policies of the USG. Enough business models are already present that benefit the entire Institute, including all six existing colleges, GTRI, and EII. Changing these structures would be both costly and disruptive. It would not lead to deep interactions with others at Tech nearly as well as embedded within an existing college.

Just like the creation of the College of Computing three decades ago, Georgia Tech was bold, and look where we have come and continue to go. Other higher education organizations followed our lead. The same is true with the OMS programs that started a decade ago – more than 70 universities worldwide followed us, making education more accessible and of high quality. The same will be true with the College of Lifetime Learning – others will follow and, in some ways, already are doing so by monitoring Tech’s every move, asking how it is going, and praising us, you, the faculty, for being so bold and transparent in our thinking.

Finally, Georgia Tech seeks to make a powerful statement that our Institute’s strategic plan aims to expand access via several mechanisms, including lifetime learning. We believe that as a public research university, we are obligated to educate people along their life journey and through their careers as technology is changing the essence of what we know and do. We owe this to our graduates, Georgia's citizens, and beyond.  Dr. Baker has been asked to lead this charge on behalf of the university and has done so. The vote during faculty governance is a vote to BEGIN formal governance with faculty – something that cannot happen as a division. Every degree decision will go through the appropriate curriculum committees and faculty senate on its way to the USG.

The new college seeks to collaborate highly with other colleges to create learning and research opportunities that benefit all. The college’s vision includes partnering with other colleges to develop joint degrees and/or certificate programs as well as professional development programs that engage people before and beyond degree programs. The college will continue to support other colleges that use its services.

The college is not a college of education. To consider this an education college is to think far too narrowly. While the study of teaching and learning is part of the college’s mission and inquiry, the college seeks to expand and shift the field of inquiry dramatically. Lifetime learning is the study of a longitudinal perspective on the teaching, learning, and workforce development of an individual and the collective societal and economic impacts. The college will not focus on teaching, and it won’t produce teachers. Rather, it seeks to produce individuals who will transform knowledge and skill acquisition into a continuous process, most of which will occur outside traditional classrooms, course, and degrees.

Digital learning will be used as one of many delivery methods in the college. Similarly, digital learning will likely be part of the college’s faculty's research inquiry, but it will not be an exclusive area of inquiry. It is one of many topics of inquiry that faculty could pursue.

This college will be structured like the other colleges at Georgia Tech. It will have a faculty that governs its curriculum and courses, and it will have an administrative staff to support the work of the faculty. The college will invite existing Georgia Tech and new faculty to join as the degree and certificate programs grow.

The existing programs of C21U, CEISMC, and GTPE will operate as centers within the college. These centers will continue to collaborate with their internal and external partners. Each of these centers hopes to provide synergy for the college’s new programs.

The new college seeks to collaborate highly with other colleges to create learning and research opportunities that benefit all. The college’s vision includes partnering with other colleges to develop joint degrees and/or certificate and professional development programs that engage people before and beyond degree programs. The college will continue to support other colleges that use its services.
The primary market segment would be those seeking to be leaders in organizations who can help shape their organization’s human talent to address business strategy. This would essentially be the space where new degrees and other credit-bearing programs would be created to meet the needs of these individuals. The market segment had more than 14,000 degrees, similar to those issued last year. Still, when the lifetime approach is utilized, it presents opportunities for Georgia Tech to expand the market by serving the lifetime spectrum. Companies such as Coca-Cola, The Home Depot, and UPS all have positions posted now for roles that graduates of the programs would be prepared to fill. Initial estimates indicate that within 3-5 years of launching new degree programs, enrollments should be around 100 graduate students.
From the report commissioned by Accenture as an outside consultant during an earlier phase of work that explored how to expand access to Georgia Tech, they provided the following information:

• Market is large and growing – bootcamps, non-credit courses, and MOOCs have been growing 35-50%
• Professional education is a $34.3B market with an 11% growth rate.
• 19.4M students in the lifetime learners’ segment for credit-bearing programs
• Research is growing $1.6B in expenditures, a 4.4% growth rate.
• Tech is well positioned to meet Georgia’s skilled labor education needs.
• The Institute is well positioned to meet Georgia’s K-12 programming needs.
• Georgia’s labor market is growing, and the GDOL Labor Force estimates a 3% growth.

The Bureau of Labor and Statistics reports that the number of learning and development manager jobs is growing by 15.3% over the next decade. Last year, more than 14,000 degrees in related fields were awarded, with nearly 75% at the MS level. Consistent with these findings, the Accenture report notes that the lifetime learner market is “large, varied, and growing” [11, p. 14, 35-44]. Therefore, the new college needs flexibility in developing degree and non-degree programs and courses.

The idea for the college grew from the Institute’s strategic plan process. Throughout the last four years, faculty and other stakeholders have worked to develop and refine this concept into a workable and transformational academic proposal. Below is a general outline of recent work; a more detailed timeline of events is available here.

• 2018: Creating the Next in Education Report.
• Late 2020: Georgia Tech Strategic Planning Process and Initial College whitepaper
• August 2021-May 2022: Pre-work phase of Lifetime Learning focus concept  
• August 2022-July 2023: Phase 1 work with three working groups, external consultant, report to ELT
• July 1, 2023: Creation of the Division of Lifetime Learning
• September 2023: Report acceptance by ELT to proceed.  
• July-December 2023: Detailed planning  
• December 2023: Discussion with USG leadership  
• Fall 2023-Spring 2024: Initial faculty governance on college creation.
• January-February 2024: University listening sessions and more comprehensive feedback on concepts.
• Spring 2024: Research areas discussion; Identify existing collaborations.
• July 2024: Launch of College
• Fall 2024: Faculty associations.
• Spring-Fall 2024: Forward Academic programming discussion; Identify potential credit-bearing topics.  
• Spring-Fall 2025: Academic programming discussion - Governance process for credit-bearing programs.
• Spring 2025: Forward Research areas discussion; Identify future directions.
• Fall 2026: Academic programming discussion; Initial student enrollments.

The budget model for the new college will be composed of two parts: (1) degree/credit-bearing programs and (2) college-collaborated models of non-degree programs. Initially, the Institute will use one-time bridge funding to support the college while establishing its credit-bearing programs. Once these programs are established, the credit-bearing programs will be funded like the other colleges.

The non-degree program budget will be like the existing division’s budget. These programs generate revenues through tuition/fees, grants, and philanthropy. In FY ’23, the division budget totaled $55.8M, creating another $37.8M in revenue distributed across Georgia Tech’s colleges and units. As the college expands, we expect the budget to grow from the new work and, in future years, from USG funding for new credit-bearing enrollments.