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Education and training are the key to the future, but a key can be turned in two directions. Turn it one way and you lock resources away, even from those they belong to. Turn it the other way and you release resources and give people back to themselves.
—Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds, p. 203
What does the future of the arts in higher education look like? Will collegiate arts programs lock away creative resources or release them? These questions prompted a study to predict how arts education will change over the next decade, done in hopes of guiding program development and resource investments within arts programs and also of opening up a dialogue with stakeholders in our enterprise such as the K-12 education community, the entertainment industry, and technology designers.
In ancient Greece, one would consult the oracle at Delphi to predict the future. Today, forecasting combines an assessment of forces contributing to change, an analysis of trends, projection into the future of those trends, and the anticipation of developments that may disrupt them. Created during the 1950s at the Rand Corporation, the Delphi technique is a forecasting tool that gathers and winnows many expert ideas—as used in this study, through consultation with a panel of 14 experts experienced in and knowledgeable about collegiate arts education. We went through several rounds of questions posed in e-mail surveys, interspersed with a sharing of the anonymous responses, challenges to them, defenses or clarifications of positions taken, and the development of predictions—all eventuating in a consensus about the future of undergraduate studies in the arts and public cultural programming.
Margaret Merrion is a professor of music and dean of the College of Fine Arts at Western Michigan University. In addition to teaching and publishing in the areas of arts in education, she has served as president of the International Council of Fine Arts Deans.
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