Designing Our Long View: Aspirations for Architectural Education

Aloha,

As you move toward the winter break I want to share a message to our community of members. You are teachers, scholars, practitioners, leaders, mentors, advocates, and more. Our organization exists to support this community, guided by values that embrace the diverse positive impacts our discipline and profession have on the world.

Last month’s Administrators Conference focused on The Long View, a theme meant to capture the reality that we are pressed to react to immediate challenges, but need to draw from a broader vision of our collective purpose in order to effectively deliver ethical, sustainable, and relevant architectural education.

During the conference, we were able to capture a number of the challenges facing our member schools in the United States, Canada, and abroad. These include:

• Diminishing enrollments
• Barriers to access
• Budget deficits
• Polarization
• Censorship
• Right-sizing the cost and scope of accreditation
• Eroding public perception of higher education
• Pressures to deliver job-ready graduates
• Mental health and well-being of students and faculty

The conference closed with a session facilitated by our strategic planning consultants from Strategy Matters. These conversations continued the following week with a member townhall on Zoom. If you are interested in reading the Strategy Matters’ report from the Administrators Conference session, please download the pdf here.

With so many dynamic changes happening within our field and outside of it, now is an important time to reassess some of the fundamental commitments of architectural education. We in the board of ACSA believe that this begins with reframing how we think about our community of schools. We would like to see the ecosystem of architectural education in more inclusive and less hierarchical ways, starting with an acknowledgment that accredited professional education does not happen independently. Architectural education happens across a continuum from K12 education through community colleges, undergraduate and graduate programs, and into continuing professional development. This reframing multiplies opportunities to strengthen our community, but it also necessitates some rethinking.  

We need to gather within ACSA’s collective mind a renewed understanding of the kinds of outcomes that our schools produce. Let’s start with the career trajectories of our graduates. In the United States alone, nearly 14,000 students graduated in 2023 with some form of architecture degree at the associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral levels. (13,000 of them were bachelor’s or master’s graduates.) This renewed understanding also includes the research and practice outcomes that faculty and staff at our member schools produce, for the public good. 

How can we both comprehend the impact that architectural education has and leverage this understanding toward a new future for ACSA and for architecture schools? 

This and related questions enliven the work of our board and staff. As we enter 2025, we hope that you will join us in ongoing discussions about uplifting our academic community. We look forward to continuing these discussions and working together to support the future of architectural education in the New Year.