Quality Driven Futures

Access Community College

After the initial chaos created by the massive demand for education, most states handle the influx with a combination of new community or tech colleges. Built by loans guaranteed in the Universal Access Act or by creating a hybrid type of tertiary education (a 11-14 system), the states create a seamless articulation between the secondary and post-secondary system. The students proceed at their own pace through a program of study, gaining a high school diploma at some point on the way to an associate degree. To accommodate the numbers of adults who decide to take advantage of the sudden opportunity, the primary colleges expand their capacities by linking to each other, libraries, and learning centers in public areas, where the students use the UAccess debit card to gain access to the system. The need for increased numbers of faculty is handled by recruiting among retired professionals, who receive their own professional development services through the local senior college.

Four-year institutions undergo a radical change in operation and orientation after the passage of UAA. They maintain a residential orientation, but the students are less homogenous in age as they are more likely to leave the institution intermittently to complete external service. As part of UAA, students can extend their access to free public education by two years through participation in concentrated community service activities. Modeled after AmeriCorps of the 1990s, students can volunteer for intensive community service activities, receive a stipend towards living expenses, and gain additional educational access credits of up to two years, depending on the time spent in service. The prime beneficiaries of the program, in addition to the students, are the inner-city school districts. Using the guaranteed loan program in UAA, districts are able to recover from decades of underspending on infrastructure. While it now takes students an average of six years to complete their education, most of them leave with credit towards a master's degree by continuing their studies through distance education while completing their community service activities. Sports are largely intramural and co-ed, with an emphasis on team development and sportsmanship. The young adult energy that once went into sport spectacles and subsequent celebrations is channeled into the construction of community gardens.

Global Tech

Consortia of universities finally link into a global system of education at the graduate level. Most classes are conducted as seminars held by video-conferencing, although campuses remain and students are expected to complete a residence requirement. The upper-level students are assigned faculty mentors and, themselves, serve as mentors to lower-level students. With full access to all libraries and any faculty expertise through Internet 3, it no longer makes sense for students to travel to other countries for their education. They do, however, come together in communities to complete any lab requirements, although their partners are as likely to be halfway around the world as in the next room. The institutions are open 24 hours per day to accommodate the time problem. Ever since the problems associated with adequate display of the board of 3-D Chess were solved, faculty members have found their students participating in tournaments while they should be conducting research. While Nigeria remains the world champion in chess, the United States has just won the honors in Go.

As workers find their jobs changing, they increasingly turn to distance learning to update their skills. Workers consult with specialized occupational designers to create individualized instructional programs designed to provide them with cutting edge skills in their areas of employment or to prepare them for new roles in the changing workplace. Resources for the individual instructional programs are gathered from institutions around the globe, packaged, and made available to the student at his or her choice of location. A local institution might sponsor the education to the extent that a degree or certificate is required. Individual courses of study might be relatively inexpensive if the material has widespread application or very expensive if the material is tightly focused. Each student is provided with a faculty tutor who functions much like a graduate advisor and whose responsibility is to seek out new materials to challenge the adult learner.