Deliberate Innovation, Lifetime Education: Final Report of the Commission on Creating the Next in Education

This moment is ripe for change in higher education. Scores of technology entrepreneurs, foundations, and policymakers are already trying to shape what the future looks like for both learners and institutions. The message for colleges and universities is clear: they can either sit idly by or join in to design their own destiny. As a selective public institution with a history of educational innovation, the Georgia Institute of Technology sits squarely in the middle of the forces shaping higher education. It is uniquely positioned to model what the university of the future might look like. This report of the Georgia Tech Commission on Creating the Next in Education (CNE) is an effort to draw with broad strokes the nature of education that defines the technological research university of the year 2040 and beyond. The Commission was formed because many within the institution are convinced that by the second half of this century Georgia Tech will be different from the university that matured and prospered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Georgia Tech’s mission seems to demand that the Institute examine the choices that lie ahead and make plans for a future that, however uncertain is bound to present opportunities and challenges that cannot be understood as incremental changes in the status quo.