“Colleges are now closing at a pace of one per week. What happens to the students?” Jon Marcus asked in a recent Hechinger Report piece. It’s not a rhetorical question — and it doesn’t have an easy answer. As educators, we’ve read the headlines, seen the numbers, and felt the pressure. Undergraduate enrollment is down. Student confidence is eroding. The enrollment cliff looms.
But instead of asking when higher education will fail, we might ask: What if this is a market correction — not a collapse? What if the problem isn’t higher education itself, but how we’ve framed its value and how we’ve taught? What if this moment is less an ending and more a beginning?
In the face of uncertainty, it’s tempting to focus on control: measurable learning outcomes, career-ready skills, standardized assessments. But today’s students are entering a competitive job market — and a world defined by accelerating change, emerging technologies, and challenges we haven’t yet named. That means our teaching needs to prepare them what’s likely and for what’s possible — and even what’s unknowable.
Ronald Beghetto’s framework for “educating for unknowable futures” offers a helpful lens. He proposes three levels of preparation:
- Educating for likely futures: equipping students with foundational skills and durable knowledge.
- Educating for possible futures: helping students build agency, creativity, and adaptability.
- Educating for unknowable futures: inviting students to grapple with uncertainty through reflection and imagination.
Each level requires a shift in how we think about learning and a new set of pedagogical commitments.
1. Educating for Likely Futures: Redesigning Assignments Around Students’ Real Lives
Career readiness remains a core concern. But often, our tools for building it are misaligned with students’ actual experiences. Take the classic business case method, for example: many cases center Fortune 500 CEOs or global crises, which can feel abstract or inaccessible to undergraduates, especially first-generation students.
That’s why I now write my own cases: short, specific, and grounded in contexts my students know. In one recent one, I explored a conflict between student-athletes and faculty at a nearby Division III college. For my mostly student-athlete class, this was familiar and therefore grounding. Their analysis shifted. So did their engagement.
Designing assignments that reflect students’ likely futures — their majors, their industries, their regions — signals that their lives are valid sites of learning. It builds relevance. And it reminds them that professional decision-making doesn’t start “out there.” It starts here.
2. Educating for Possible Futures: Using EdTech with Purpose
Students also need to develop adaptive skills: how to think critically, navigate ambiguity, and evaluate tools in evolving environments. EdTech is a perfect place to practice this.
Today’s education market is flooded with tools — over 370 vendors across over 40 market segments, according to Encoura. But quantity isn’t quality. Too often, we adopt tools based on novelty or institutional trends rather than instructional value.
To support students in building discernment, we must model it ourselves. That means asking: Does this tool solve a real problem in my class? Does it deliver on its promises? Does it support learning equitably and sustainably?
In other words, we must shift from passive adopters to intentional evaluators and invite students into that evaluative process. Helping them think about how technology shapes learning (and their own agency within it) equips them for any environment, not just the one we’ve built.
3. Educating for Unknowable Futures: Making Space for Reflection
Preparing students for the truly unknown requires something more radical: making space for performance, yes, but also for reflection.
In a recent MBA course on negotiation and conflict, I made a bold move: I assigned weekly reflection journals — raw, stream-of-consciousness entries that linked course themes to students’ lived experiences. Some students resisted at first. But by the end, many said it changed the way they approached class and life.
Reflection is often treated as an add-on, something optional or “soft.” But it’s essential. It helps students surface assumptions, interrogate choices, and practice metacognition. And in a world where knowledge and skills are constantly evolving, the ability to learn how to learn may be the most durable skill of all.
Possibility Thinking, in Practice
If our current moment is a reckoning, then our response must be one of responsibility. We cannot guarantee our students a particular future. But we can offer them the tools to shape one.
Beghetto calls this “agentic awareness” — a belief in one’s ability to influence outcomes. It’s a curriculum and a posture. And it’s something we can model by how we teach: with creativity, clarity, and curiosity.
So the next time you see another headline about higher ed’s collapse, ask yourself: What if we treated this as a moment to reimagine rather than as a crisis to survive?
That’s resilience, and it’s possibility thinking in action.
Three Small Shifts You Can Make This Semester
Now is the perfect time to start leaning into the possibility of our problems. To do so, try:
- Redesigning one assignment to reflect your students’ actual career goals or lived experiences. Meeting students where they are will help them better envision where they’re headed.
- Asking your classroom technology better questions. Push beyond features to real learning outcomes when you choose to invite EdTech into your classroom.
- Making reflection part of the grade. Don’t treat it as busywork but as weighted, important meaning-making.
Higher education may be facing unprecedented disruption, but disruption doesn’t have to mean decline. In fact, the classroom may be one of the last places where we still have real influence over what comes next. Each lesson we design, each conversation we facilitate, each moment we create for reflection — these are acts of future-building.
Educating for unknowable futures doesn’t mean we need to predict what’s next. It means we help students learn to ask better questions, adapt with confidence, and recognize their own capacity to shape change. And it means we embrace that same mindset ourselves.
The future of higher education won’t be saved by sweeping reforms or silver-bullet technologies. It will be co-created — one thoughtful assignment, one intentional choice, one student at a time. And that work starts not in distant policy meetings, but right here, in our classrooms.
Laura Nicole Miller, DET, is an assistant professor in the Grenon School of Business at Assumption University, where she teaches organizational communication, marketing, and management. A first-generation college graduate and former EdTech executive, she studies how communication practices shape equity, trust, and student success in high-stakes environments.
References
Bauman, D. (2024, February 7). Colleges were already bracing for an ‘enrollment cliff.’ Now there might be a second one. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/colleges-were-already-bracing-for-an-enrollment-cliff-now-there-might-be-a-second-one
Beghetto, R. A. (2023). Broadening horizons of the possible in education. Possibility Studies & Society, 1(4), 414-426. https://doi.org/10.1177/27538699231182014
Binkley, C. (2023, March 10). Why more Americans are skipping college. PBS News. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/why-more-americans-are-skipping-college
Craft, A. (2015). Possibility thinking: From what is to what might be. In R. Wegerif, L. Li, & J. C. Kaufman (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of research on teaching thinking (pp. 15–26). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315797021
Encoura. (2023). Higher education technology landscape research. https://www.encoura.org/eduventures-research/evolve-your-online-strategy/tech-landscape/
Fry, R., Braga, D., & Parker, K. (2024, May 23). Is college worth it? Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/05/23/is-college-worth-it-2/
Marcus, J. (2024, April 26). Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week. What happens to the students? The Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/colleges-are-now-closing-at-a-pace-of-one-a-week-what-happens-to-the-students/
Miller, L. N. (2025). “D-III students deserve better”: strategic communication with college stakeholders. The CASE Journal, 21(3), 493-516. https://doi.org/10.1108/TCJ-06-2024-0184
Miller, L.N. (2025). We need to ask smarter questions of ed tech. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2025/07/30/we-need-ask-smarter-questions-ed-tech-opinion
