Our university—like most—was designed around a model of education that has remained fairly constant for hundreds of years. But many schools and educators are currently looking at this model with fresh eyes. The potential disruption posed by online learning allows us to question how time, space, expertise, accreditation, and student agency may also change within higher education. Many parts of the undergraduate experience are ripe for reinvention.

College has multiple aims: it’s a place to gain expertise and develop abilities, but also to come of age. These are entwined together in a residential college experience―a complex and special setting. Enormous energy and investment are now being placed in experimentation and pioneering in the online learning space. We wanted to complement these efforts with an exploration of learning and living on campus, now and in the future.

A design team from the Stanford d.school worked with hundreds of perceptive, creative, and generous students, faculty, and administrators over the course of a year to explore this territory. We considered many lenses—from how students prepare for a Stanford education while still in high school, to patterns of undergraduate decision-making about what and how they study, to the shifting needs and expectations from future employers. 

The project culminated with an experiential exhibit entitled “Stanford 2025,” held at the d.school in May 2014. To encourage an exploratory mindset, the event was staged as a time-travel journey. The community embarked to the distant future—and landed just at the moment when Stanford was looking back retrospectively at major paradigm shifts that “happened” around 2025. These possible shifts were shared as provocations—a subjective, student-centered imagining of what could happen as the future unfolds.

Here, on this website, we invite you to travel with us and explore these possible futures. Then, we hope you will use the provocations—and the tools available on the site—to spark your own vision for the future of higher education by trying some experiments.

Now, strap in, and let’s go to the year 2100…

Your time to travel

Now it's your turn! Be pulled back into history before launching into the future. Hear the moments that made Stanford what it is today and listen for the moments that will make it to tomorrow. 

Headphones recommended