Higher education in 2030

Citation

Ince, M. (2019), "Higher education in 2030", Higher Education Evaluation and Development, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 48-52. https://doi.org/10.1108/HEED-06-2019-026

Higher education in 2030

Having worked extensively with the UK Government’s Foresight function[1], I must stress first that it is impossible to predict the future, because it has not happened yet. It is, however, possible to say something useful about trends and changes that people and organisations need to be aware of in their thinking. It is also true to say that some long-term trends go unnoticed for reasons that later seem hard to explain. In 1896, Svante Arrhenius, who later won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, published what is generally regarded as the first authoritative study of climate change due to the human use of fossil fuels[2]. It remained little more than a curiosity until the issue became live a century later. Likewise in the 1950s to the 1970s, it was generally regarded (not least in science fiction) as obvious that computers would become small, cheap and widely used[3]. It was not well-appreciated that they would all be joined into a planet-sized information machine linked together by the telephone system.

At the time of writing, 2030 was 12 years away. One handy technique in futurology is to look back in time to see what has changed over the amount of time one wishes to imagine into the future. So, 12 years ago, in 2006, there were far fewer university students, far fewer international students, but not many fewer universities. More recent students have mainly attended universities that were already in existence, but which have grown hugely in recent years. Teaching methods at that time were more traditional and less oriented towards generic graduate skills. The focus would be more on learning a subject, and no university would be involved in extraneous activity such as helping students to be more employable. Universities would also be detached islands of learning in the towns and cities they inhabited, not the integrated civic institutions we see increasingly today.

Now, why do we need universities today, and why will we need them in 2030? One reason is that just over 200 years ago, there were about a billion people on Earth, and most were too poor to use much of the Earth’s resources. Now there are over 7bn, many of them affluent. The impact they are having is so great that here are serious moves to have the present day declared as a new and human-dominated geological era, the Anthropocene[4]. This change calls for good decisions by a wise and well-informed population. Universities have a vital role in this situation. They create educated people, both global geniuses and less visible informed professionals who run things well and take good decisions with ethical and evidential support. They also produce the new knowledge we need, increasingly as part of knowledge networks as well as in their own right, joining hands with businesses, government, NGOs and others including the public at large. The time gap between new research and its application has shrunk because of this change and will grow narrower, abolishing the distinction between pure and applied research. To point up some of these issues, look at the big five world issues described by the late Hans Rosling in his book Factfulness[5]. (This is by the way a book people should read in detail.) They are:

• climate change;

• the Third World War;

• a major financial crash – possibly bigger than 2008;

• epidemic disease; and

• extreme poverty.

It would be possible to argue that all these threats are caused by the human race’s increasing grasp of science and technology, whether in IT, weaponry, finance or transport. But the real point is that they all arise from human nature: people have been fighting wars or lusting after wealth throughout history. Our economic systems and our political ones, national and global, have certainly not kept pace with our technological prowess. This means in turn that universities will have to get better at multi-, cross- and inter-disciplinary research to generate the new wisdom we need, and will have to be closer to their communities, in a wide range of ways, to ensure that they are asking the right questions and articulating the answers they generate as well as possible to the right audiences. Of course, this change will have internal effects on university dynamics. Once external actors are involved in designing research, carrying it out and interpreting the findings, communications skills become a more important asset for researchers, and maybe the prestige gap between science and the arts will become a little narrower too.

In an example from my own work, I have been involved with the Future Ocean initiative at Kiel in Germany, for decades a global centre for ocean research in all the usual fields – geology and geophysics, chemistry and biology, for instance. This research is already a joint effort involving the university, politically part of the regional government system, and Geomar, a federal German research centre. Future Ocean used funds from the German Excellence Initiative, directed at improving elite research, to build out into every faculty of the university. Some were comparatively obvious – economics has a lot to do with fisheries – but sociology (nations vanishing under water) and theology have also been an important part of the picture, as has extensive outreach to business, schools and many other interest groups[6]. At Kiel and elsewhere, this reorientation of university priorities is best seen in its global context. The existence of the UN Special Development Goals[7], each of which inherently calls for usable research knowledge, stresses once more the importance of coherent local and global action and solidarity. Internationally educated people are a key ingredient in this mix. Internationally, mobile students have grown in number and their total now approaches 5m[8]. What is the future of this trend, and will it bend?

Political and economic factors suggest that this growth should cease. Politically, anti-global political forces are more powerful than for many decades, in the USA not least. Even the Prime Minister of the UK at the time of writing, Theresa May, has said that the UK educates too many foreign students. If she had said something similar about another major UK success story, say car manufacturing, she would have been regarded as mad. It is unlikely that students are unaffected by this shift in emphasis, tone and language. Economically, the percentage of world output accounted for by internationally traded goods and services fell a long way in 2008 and its growth has not resumed[9]. If the world is not getting more global, maybe the world workforce will not need to be global either.

However, the economic and demographic forces in the favour of international higher education are also strong. A growing number of countries are now producing too few babies to maintain their population: some, such as Japan, markedly so[10]. This is good news for elite activities such as higher education. Each child has in effect more parents and grandparents to put resources into them than did previous generations. And this effect is multiplied by the growth of the middle class, always anxious to put resources into the education of its next generation. In any event, it is also true that educated people live longer, richer lives and becoming more educated will continue to be a huge life advantage for individuals. Higher education will continue to be the smart choice for people who can take advantage of it. Indeed, a Master’s degree has now replaced the bachelor degree as the entry qualification for many professions, including my own background arena of science journalism. In any case, it is to be hoped that university study becomes more common. The world needs more educated and internationally aware individuals. Universities are the best way of producing the people it needs to cope with issues such as global warming, and for relating empathetically with individuals from unfamiliar cultures.

This demographic crisis is a rare exception to the general rule that we cannot predict the future. As 11-year olds do not go to university in significant numbers, we know that everyone who will be in university in 2030 has already been born, and we know how many there are of them. The results are alarming for university managers. In the Republic of Korea, for example, the number of school leavers is now less than the number of university places, so all of them could go to university. The story is similar in many other nations. Universities have few options for coping with this big change. While it is rare for a university to close, they can merge. In addition, many have prioritised enhancing their intake of foreign students, and they cannot all succeed. The damage is likely to be especially severe for less prestigious universities. Of course, the counterargument to the demographic crisis is automation. Much of the extensive literature on whether robots (broadly defined) will take over work from humans is, to put it politely, inconclusive. There are of course some developments, such as driverless vehicles, which seem at first sight to have major and obvious implications for employment. More importantly for our purposes, it has also become apparent that some graduate jobs, perhaps in finance, the law or medicine, might be at least as vulnerable to automation as less educationally demanding ones. It has long been thought that any job that can be described in a rules-based way is in principle more vulnerable to automation than one that depends on human judgement. But it may be that artificial intelligence and machine learning will alter this balance of power by developing machines with true capacity for judgement and intuition.

In any case, the arrival of these technologies has profound effects on what universities do and how they do it. They will speed up innovation, and there is current debate on whether this is happening today. And they will reduce the half-life of knowledge, making the university mission of lifetime learning more important and stressing the need for soft skills (human empathy, communication and comfort with numbers) to be developed in students alongside subject knowledge. It also perhaps stresses the divide in university missions between those with a mission to impart technical knowledge and those which more stress these soft skills.

In addition, universities would suffer as much as any other form of social organisation in some highly dystopian future resulting from these technologies. One might involve a massive IT collapse which deprived Homo sapiens of much of its systems, knowledge and organisational base; or AIs could just decide they do not need us. It would be worth universities putting some research effort into avoiding both of these outcomes. These considerations remind us too of one university role that remains vital and which may grow in importance, that of critic. Here is an example. The population of the UK was first enumerated with precision in the 1861 census and since then, there has been a persistent technocratic fantasy of replacing human social judgement with numbers-based, quantitative decisions on big social issues. Indeed, the term “statistics” refers to the numerical data needed to run the state. The current fashion for “big data” is its latest manifestation. For this author, the fact that we can now gather, store, transmit and cross-correlate massive volumes of data in new ways is a world-changing development. But it does not lessen the value of human judgement. Big Data has now reached the top of the famous Gartner hype cycle[11], and will soon be seen to be a useful but not revolutionary invention, like nanotechnology or social media before it. Academics are the members of society who can most easily put some sense into overheated topics such as this one. At the same time, universities also have a distinctive social role that can mean trouble. We might think that subjects such as religion or politics are most likely to get universities into trouble with the authorities, especially in traditional societies. But the example of climate change shows that even the stolid Earth sciences (I write as a one-time geologist) can be controversial. The same applies to potentially positive but resolutely difficult areas such as biotechnology.

Around the world, governments regard academics and universities as opponents rather than critical friends all too often. Their reliance on state funding means that they are an easy target for the growing range of governments around the world for which truth is a matter of judgement. Note too that in the past, universities used to get into trouble for speaking truth to power. Now they can also be blamed for speaking truth to the powerless. In the UK, they have been involved in making the unpopular point that the national economy depends upon migrant workers, a view not shared by many of those placed modestly in the British social system. Finally, I hope and believe that universities will always keep their ability to surprise. If they are finding out new knowledge, some at least of this wisdom should be unexpected. For instance, a lot is said about the impact of university research. One of the most impactful universities in the world is Oxford. It has been going since 1096 (at least) and quite good at science, medicine and the full range of the arts, humanities and social sciences. But its most impactful professor was no medic. Professor JRR (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien probably never held a research grant, but his work has sold billions of dollars’ worth of books and cinema tickets; created hundreds of jobs; and more importantly, changed minds. As readers may be aware, he used Nordic, Teutonic and Celtic precedents to create an imaginary land of magic and adventure called Middle Earth, most famously in The Hobbit, a book for children, and The Lord of the Rings, a long book in three volumes for an adult audience. They became a sensation in the English-speaking world and to a lesser degree beyond, and have been filmed. The point here is not the economic impact of his work but the effect it has on the imagination of countless individuals. His imagined Middle Earth has affected how people think about the actual Earth, to the point where babies are named after his characters and his words appear on people’s gravestones. There is even a house called Rivendell near my home in England, named after a settlement of Elves in The Lord of the Rings and indicative of the narrative’s charm and influence. Perhaps the message is that if you know exactly what an academic is going to do, it is time for him or her to retire.

This author’s interest in global higher education springs from his involvement in university ranking on a global scale. Existing rankings measure what universities do via measures such as the student experience; employer and academic opinion; employability outcomes; and research power (arguably to excess). In recent years, they have improved methodologically and by innovation. For example, QS now ranks 46 subjects as well as institutions overall, and publishes a well-received ranking of graduate employability[12]. New indicators include international web visibility, student exchange and publishing as well as industry links. However, there are still things university rankings are less good at measuring. My own organisation, QS, is open about these gaps. They include teaching; long-term alumnus career development; national and global thought leadership; and the overall human development of students. This last is a tricky issue. A well-developed student in Taiwan and one in California might well be two very different people. Rankings are also poor at measuring innovative forms of education such as MOOCs, or learning by older people who may not be studying for the sake of career advancement.

In addition, universities have been developing so fast in recent years that even staying still in these rankings requires constant change, and there is little sign of the Red Queen effect, as it is known, slowing to a halt. The Red Queen is a character in the book Through the Looking Glass, by the author Lewis Carroll[13], and the point is that she has to run ever faster just to stay still. Table I shows the growth in the top 100 universities ranked by QS between 2011 and 2017. (Note that the citations window has grown from five years to six, so that this figure is not completely comparable.) In the five years to 2017, Harvard alone had 83,000 papers in the Scopus database used by QS. In addition, universities are challenged by new forms of research and teaching institution, including highly interdisciplinary research centres whose output may not fit into conventional scholarly classifications, and universities which favour the civic mission over having papers in high-impact journals[14]. However, students will continue to use rankings in growing numbers and rankings will continue to get better, perhaps above all by getting cleverer at measuring teaching and learning rather that continuing with their present focus on research.

Table I

The growth in the top 100 universities ranked by QS between 2011 and 2017

Top 100	2017	2011	Change %
FTE students	27,421	23,442	+17
FTE faculty (1,131 international)	3,631	2,806	+29
International students	6,917	4,246	+62
Papers (Harvard 83,582)	33,650	23,778	+41
Citations (extra year)	348,972	137,916	+153

Source: QS ranking

Notes

1. Foresight.gov.uk

2. On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground, Svante Arrhenius, Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science Series 5, Vol. 41, April 1896, pp. 237-276.

3. For example, The Feeling of Power, Isaac Asimov, Worlds of Science Fiction 1958 and cited at technovelgy.com

4. http://bit.ly/2SBU0xs

5. Factfulness, Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Sceptre 2018: UK edition ISBN 978-1-473-63746-7.

6. http://hr.futureocean.org

7. About the Special Development Goals, UN, recovered at www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ on 4 January 2019.

8. Education at a Glance 2018, OECD, Paris 2018, especially table and chart B6.2.

9. Data from tradingeconomics.com

10. E.g. World Population Prospects 2015.

11. Gartner Hype Cycle, Gartner https://gtnr.it/2SCOlao recovered 4 January 2019.

12. Topuniversities.com and iu.qs.com.

13. Through the looking Glass, Lewis Carroll, Macmillan 1871.

14. E.g. Newcastle University in the UK, www.ncl.ac.uk/globalchallenges/cities/#projects