Forbes Magazine Highlight's SNHU's Transformative Culture

Universities help drive the transformation now underway regionally, focusing on conducting research, incubating new businesses and upskilling or reskilling labor to meet technology driven changes in labor demand.

"On a positive note, embracing societal change means that people have to learn to compete with the help of smarter machines-ones that augment individual, institutional and organizational capabilities. As a result, people are gravitating toward becoming life-long learners-able to adapt to change-and able to compete with machines and not against them," states Spohrer.

To attract the "life long learner", universities are aligning their capabilities to support a new type of student-one that maintains a full-time job, has a family or has limited time, thereby requiring flexibility to meet program requirements.

"This transformation calls for doubling student enrollment via online college courses. Some Universities such as Southern New Hampshire University are way ahead of the curve and others such as MIT and Stanford are also moving in this direction," Spohrer elaborates.