EDUCATION INTERVIEW
Challenges Among the top challenges for education is the gap between what future jobs will require and the number of people available to fill them
Christopher Fiorentino President – West Chester University What is the biggest challenge for higher education? This is a world where the areas in which jobs are growing are areas that require some kind of higher education credential. It’s critically important for the well-being of citizens and economic growth that higher education is able to effectively prepare students for the opportunities out there. There are great opportunities for people who have the preparation but the gap between the jobs that are on the horizon that require a college degree or other post-high school certificate and the number of people available to fill those jobs who don’t have the necessary credentials is a big problem. That’s going to be one of the biggest challenges that higher education faces in the coming decade. What makes West Chester University a great university? We have a couple things in our favor. The town of West Chester is an incredible place and a college town, and we have a beautiful campus. When you have a beautiful campus, in a beautiful town, in a place like Chester County, it’s easy for us to attract good talent. We have incredible faculty. We’re more of a teachingfocused institution in comparison to the large universities that are focused more on research, so at West Chester University we have excellent, passionate professors. For virtually every program that can receive an external accreditation, we have achieved that validation of excellence. We have very good retention and graduation rates but we’re still always looking at how we can do better. How has the pandemic affected the university’s use of technology? At the undergraduate level, we were a traditional face-to-face university. We had a few online classes but we didn’t have any undergraduate programs that you could take start to finish online. However,
the pandemic has prompted our faculty to embrace technology even more. Although they’re not interested in teaching strictly online, we expect more and more of our faculty to implement new technology tools, such as videos and group chats, even when they’re face-toface. We outfitted all 200-plus of our classrooms with technology that allows for students to join class from remote locations, and the professor can see the students on a screen. We didn’t use this that much in the past year because most of the faculty weren’t actually on campus but going forward, that technology is there and we have that opportunity. We’re going to see a richness of technological tools being utilized by faculty. www.capitalanalyticsassociates.com
| 171
