Mike Lovell, president of Marquette University, says higher education is “on the precipice of a transformation.”

“There has been a tsunami coming at us over the last 10 years… and it’s just about upon us,” Lovell said at a recent luncheon meeting of the Wisconsin Technology Council’s Innovation Network in Milwaukee.

Lovell, who was hired by Marquette in 2014, spoke on some challenges facing the university and other institutions around the country, including a growing scepticism about the payoff of pursuing post-secondary education.

“Our financial model is broken,” he said. “The financial model for higher ed has been broken for a while. … Debt has also led to a great price sensitivity, and people for the first time in our history are questioning the value of higher ed.”

And, he added, the entire delivery structure for higher education is shifting as well.

“The value is no longer the content you can teach in courses, but how you accredit the skills the students learn from that content,” he said.

Technology is evolving in nearly every sector of the economy, he said, making it harder to prepare students for industry.

“We are now trying to prepare students for jobs that don’t exist today,” he said. “In fact, I heard a statistic that for students that are in elementary school today, that 70 percent of them will be working jobs that don’t exist today.”  Read the full story here.