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Episode 8: Chronocentrism and Questioning Predictions
In this episode, Phil Hill, Jeanette Wiseman, and Kevin Kelly discuss the concept of Chronocentrism as applied by John Watson to an education context. What if a lot of the common predictions we have turn out to be wrong?
Hosts:
* Phil Hill* Jeanette Wiseman* Kevin Kelly
Transcription:
Phil: Welcome to COVID Transitions. I’m Phil Hill, and I’m here with Jeanette Wiseman and Kevin Kelly talking about the transitions that higher education is going through due to COVID-19. It’s been a good week for me. I will say leading off that I was able to go away for the first time and had a meal, a lunch with my wife. It’s part of our anniversary. Out in a real restaurant with real server, so it’s been an exciting week for me. How are you guys doing?
Kevin: I’m doing just fine. I had a birthday this week and doing some good stuff this weekend, taking a class over Zoom. If you can believe it, for how to fingerpicking the blues.
Jeanette: Really? Oh, that’s impressive.
Kevin: We’ll see.
Jeanette: We were hoping to go camping this weekend, but still in New Mexico you can’t camp unless [00:01:00] you find a private campground. The overnights are still not allowed, which we were going to do. But it is so hot here that I think we’re just going to stay home. Except for if we could, we could. Maybe we’ll send the girls outside.
Phil: Well, we had our lunch in ninety five degree heat. I did not complain since I was just so happy to be out with other humans. What we’d like to talk about today builds on something that we mentioned two weeks ago. Two weeks ago we were discussing the community colleges and how their enrollments seem to be going up, and then we also looked at Arizona State University showing dramatically increased enrollment for the summer. And at the same time, it seems like the conventional wisdom had become, based on surveys, that enrollment was going to be dropping somewhere between 10 and 30 [00:02:00] % across all of higher education. We asked the question “at a certain point, we need to question, are these surveys right? We shouldn’t take that those are gospel.” We might be developing a conventional wisdom that’s just wrong. And at the same time, there was an article that came out yesterday from John Watson at the Evergreen Group, a consulting and analysis firm that works mostly in K-12. But I think this post was excellent. “Will post pandemic school be different? The case against.” And essentially what he does is refer to an article that came out in the Atlantic that essentially says, “I predict your predictions are wrong.” And it points out how often we actually look at our times as unique, and that we’ve never faced anything like it. And so there’s [00:03:00] a tendency to overestimate the significance of long term changes based on our current crises. And we’ll go over some more of the details.
John took the argument to bring up – what if so many of these arguments are wrong, and that we’re going to be a lot more normal than we thought we would be once we get into the fall or even beyond that, that we’re not just having fundamental transformations? I think it’s an interesting question and very interesting article. And point out that Moody’s came out today with their estimate of enrollment for the fall. They’re predicting that total enrollment goes up. Now they’re predicting that the rough enrollment revenue, or tuition revenue, goes down overall, but enrollment could actually be up. We have these contradictory signals.
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By COVID Transitions – MindWires ConsultingIn this episode, Phil Hill, Jeanette Wiseman, and Kevin Kelly discuss the concept of Chronocentrism as applied by John Watson to an education context. What if a lot of the common predictions we have turn out to be wrong?
Hosts:
* Phil Hill* Jeanette Wiseman* Kevin Kelly
Transcription:
Phil: Welcome to COVID Transitions. I’m Phil Hill, and I’m here with Jeanette Wiseman and Kevin Kelly talking about the transitions that higher education is going through due to COVID-19. It’s been a good week for me. I will say leading off that I was able to go away for the first time and had a meal, a lunch with my wife. It’s part of our anniversary. Out in a real restaurant with real server, so it’s been an exciting week for me. How are you guys doing?
Kevin: I’m doing just fine. I had a birthday this week and doing some good stuff this weekend, taking a class over Zoom. If you can believe it, for how to fingerpicking the blues.
Jeanette: Really? Oh, that’s impressive.
Kevin: We’ll see.
Jeanette: We were hoping to go camping this weekend, but still in New Mexico you can’t camp unless [00:01:00] you find a private campground. The overnights are still not allowed, which we were going to do. But it is so hot here that I think we’re just going to stay home. Except for if we could, we could. Maybe we’ll send the girls outside.
Phil: Well, we had our lunch in ninety five degree heat. I did not complain since I was just so happy to be out with other humans. What we’d like to talk about today builds on something that we mentioned two weeks ago. Two weeks ago we were discussing the community colleges and how their enrollments seem to be going up, and then we also looked at Arizona State University showing dramatically increased enrollment for the summer. And at the same time, it seems like the conventional wisdom had become, based on surveys, that enrollment was going to be dropping somewhere between 10 and 30 [00:02:00] % across all of higher education. We asked the question “at a certain point, we need to question, are these surveys right? We shouldn’t take that those are gospel.” We might be developing a conventional wisdom that’s just wrong. And at the same time, there was an article that came out yesterday from John Watson at the Evergreen Group, a consulting and analysis firm that works mostly in K-12. But I think this post was excellent. “Will post pandemic school be different? The case against.” And essentially what he does is refer to an article that came out in the Atlantic that essentially says, “I predict your predictions are wrong.” And it points out how often we actually look at our times as unique, and that we’ve never faced anything like it. And so there’s [00:03:00] a tendency to overestimate the significance of long term changes based on our current crises. And we’ll go over some more of the details.
John took the argument to bring up – what if so many of these arguments are wrong, and that we’re going to be a lot more normal than we thought we would be once we get into the fall or even beyond that, that we’re not just having fundamental transformations? I think it’s an interesting question and very interesting article. And point out that Moody’s came out today with their estimate of enrollment for the fall. They’re predicting that total enrollment goes up. Now they’re predicting that the rough enrollment revenue, or tuition revenue, goes down overall, but enrollment could actually be up. We have these contradictory signals.