Professional futurist Lee Shupp spends a lot of time thinking about what people will be doing ten or twenty years from now.  While humans aren’t usually very good at long-term and abstract planning, Shupp’s background in systems thinking and his boundless curiosity provide a good platform to stand on while peeling back the curtain for a sneak peak at what may lie ahead.

Shupp says that current tensions in higher education such as student debt load, rising costs, lower graduation rates, and declining public support make change inevitable.  Some of the major change agents likely to reshape higher ed include:

• More and better learning analytics
• Personalized adaptive learning via Artificial Intelligence systems
• Competency-based education
• Shorter timelines for degrees
• Corporate influences

Shupp advises his students at the California College of Art to learn how to learn, to hone the ability to act as the curator for your own learning experience, and to develop the ability to filter and evaluate information.

Students who bring human skills like intuition, pattern recognition, and human thinking to augment artificial intelligence will be in a good position in the job market, Shupp says.  Follow him on Twitter @leeshupp.