by Arthur Levine, Inside Higher Ed
That definition of access, while still essential, is now outdated and inadequate — no longer serving the nation’s needs. The United States is making a transition from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, information economy. The historic view of access is a product of the former, while largely ignoring the realities of the latter. Today we need something very different. The United States is experiencing profound, accelerating and continuous change owing to the transition, and the lives of many Americans are being disrupted. Jobs are being eliminated, both those requiring relatively little education and increasingly those requiring a great deal of education but involving routine work — even in fields such as journalism, medicine and law. Some of those jobs have migrated to other countries, but the overwhelming majority of them — four out of five — have been lost to automation.
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