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While MOOCS are hardly a step forward pedagogically, they have brought distance learning out of the shadows and into daily discourse about the future of higher education.

The lines between for-profit and not-for-profit are blurring as partnerships evolve between community colleges offering two-year diplomas and for-profit colleges awarding the bachelor’s degree. For-profit corporations now provide the platform and technical know-how for expanding the reach of not-for-profit master’s programs at many major universities.

Educational technologies will need to be employed for building new models of learning

"direct assessment" provision in the Higher Education Act

We encourage every college to consider developing competency-based degree programs. Don't wait. Now is the time.

will open the door for the low-income students who need it the most.

37 percent of all students who began college in 2008 have transferred institutions at some point. Nearly half of transfer students transfer more than once.

At ASU, our university, nearly 13,500 transfer students enrolled in fall 2014 and spring 2015 semesters, outnumbering first-time freshmen by more than 2,000. These transfer numbers are likely to explode in coming years, with profound consequences for students and universities alike.

Today, more than one-third of college students are 25 or older. Only 14 percent of college students are residential students, and 46 percent are part-time college students.

A recurring theme of the daylong meeting, most of which was off the record, was that policymaking on higher education is a balancing act of encouraging innovation and safeguarding investments. And while the federal government has plenty of influence, it has only the “blunt instruments” of financial aid programs to actually tell colleges what to do.

What should a college graduate know and be able to do? There are as many views on that as there are colleges (thousands), if not individual professors and students (many more). The diversity of opinions about what a college education means has long been seen as a strength of American higher education. But in recent years, many employers and policy makers have argued that the lack of a common definition of what students should know and be able to do -- and a dearth of adequate methods of gauging whether they know it and can do it -- has contributed to a decline in the quality of higher education and to the awarding of more degrees, but of lesser value.

This last decade of the music industry presages the coming decade of education. Choice is expanding at every level, from pre-k to graduate school. The individual course, rather than the degree, is becoming the unit of content. And universities, the record labels of education, are facing increased pressure to unbundle their services. So what will the future of education look like?

The price of content will freefall over the next seven years.

Education will be personalized.