At the Edge of What Comes Next: Why We’re Gathering in San Diego for experience: LIAISON

There is something fitting about gathering in San Diego for experience: LIAISON in 2027.

Look at a map and you can see part of the reason. San Diego sits at the southwestern edge of the continental United States, facing the Pacific and pressed against an international border, a place where countries, cultures, industries, ideas, and people have been meeting for generations. Spend some time with the city, though, and “edge” starts to feel less like geography and more like a way of understanding it.

San Diego has been shaped by boundaries, certainly, but perhaps more importantly by what happens around them. This is a place where research universities, military installations, technology companies, and communities on both sides of an international border have spent generations influencing one another. Ideas developed in one setting find unexpected uses in another; people and cultures move back and forth across lines that look much cleaner on a map than they do in lived experience. Even the Pacific changes depending on how you look at it: From one direction, it marks the place where the continent ends; from another, it opens San Diego to the rest of the world.

That’s why meeting in San Diego for experience: LIAISON seems particularly relevant at a moment when so many of higher education’s familiar boundaries are becoming less reliable.

The boundaries between learning and work are shifting as students ask harder questions about the relationship between education and opportunity. The boundaries between institutions are changing, too, as partnerships, shared services, transfer pathways, and governance systems complicate our old ideas about where one institution ends and another begins.

Other lines are getting harder to draw as well. We are still figuring out where human judgment matters most as AI increasingly becomes part of the work we do. The students institutions once assumed they would serve are changing, along with their expectations about where, how, and whether they should enroll. And colleges and universities themselves are experiencing this moment very differently on an institution-by-institution basis, making it harder to talk about a single “higher education market” without glossing over complicated and important considerations.

For enrollment leaders, none of this is particularly abstract. It shows up in the students we are trying to reach, the questions they ask, the data we rely on, the systems we use, and the pressure to make better decisions with fewer resources and less certainty. The temptation is to search for a map that tells us where all of this is going. But periods of transition rarely provide one. More often, we begin to understand what is changing by paying attention to the places where familiar categories no longer quite hold.

San Diego has had some experience with that.

More than a century ago, San Diego was still a relatively small city when its leaders began preparing for something audacious: the 1915 Panama-California Exposition.

The Panama Canal was changing the routes that connected the global economy, and San Diego saw  an opportunity to imagine a different place for itself within that world. The exposition would celebrate the canal’s opening while introducing the city to a much larger audience, and much of that vision took physical form in Balboa Park.

Today, it can be easy to experience Balboa Park as though it were inevitable: museums, gardens, cultural institutions, and extraordinary architecture assembled in the middle of the city. But places like that are rarely inevitable. They exist because people make decisions about what they believe a community might someday need, often before that future is particularly easy to see.

I like that idea of stewardship because it asks something different of us than prediction. The people making those decisions did not need to know exactly what San Diego would become over the next century. They needed to think carefully about what was worth building and preserving, and about the possibilities their choices might leave open for people they would never meet. Higher education is being asked to do something similar.

None of us knows exactly what the next decade will bring, and the past few years should probably make us suspicious of anyone who claims otherwise. We do know that students will continue to need places to learn, discover, belong, build expertise, encounter people unlike themselves, and prepare for lives that cannot be reduced to a labor-market forecast. Institutions will have to find new ways to reach those students and help them persist. Technology will change some parts of this work profoundly while leaving us to decide which parts should become more valuable precisely because they remain human. Those decisions require imagination, but they also require conversation.

If you’ve attended experience: LIAISON before, you know that it, too, inspires imagination and fosters meaningful conversation among those in our shared community. A conference cannot resolve every uncertainty facing higher education, and a few days away from campus will not make the pressures waiting back home disappear. What it can do is change the way we think about them.

An enrollment leader wrestling with a problem at one institution can discover that someone across the country has been working on the same question from a completely different direction. A conversation between a practitioner and a technologist can complicate both of their assumptions and lead to new thinking about how to address their mutual priorities. Time away from the urgency of the next deadline or enrollment cycle can make room for questions about what our institutions are becoming, rather than only what needs to be done by Friday.

That kind of exchange feels particularly important now because the next chapter of higher education will not be determined by technology or demographics or policy in isolation. It will emerge from thousands of choices people make  about what we preserve, what we redesign, where we collaborate, where we experiment, and what remains worth doing precisely because a human being is there to do it.

Those choices are harder to see clearly from inside our individual institutions, surrounded by the immediate demands of the work. One of the great pleasures of gathering with colleagues is discovering how different the horizon can look from somewhere else.

San Diego has spent generations living with that kind of perspective. Land meets ocean here. Nations meet. Research meets industry. History keeps encountering reinvention. More than a century ago, a relatively small city looked toward a newly opened canal, recognized that the routes connecting it to the rest of the world were changing, and began imagining what those new connections might make possible.

Higher education is watching some of its own routes change now. The paths students take toward institutions, through them, and into the lives that follow are becoming less predictable. Technology is creating new routes between people and information. Old boundaries between institutions, credentials, work, and learning are becoming more permeable. Some of those changes are exhilarating; others are genuinely unsettling. Most are probably both.

San Diego seems like a good place to spend a few days thinking about what happens when the map begins to change, surrounded by people who are trying to read it too. Join us for experience: LIAISON in San Diego, June 22–24, 2027. We’d love to see you there.