Futures of Higher Education and the Recovery of Purpose

Over the last three decades of neoliberal globalisation, new policy languages have emerged for talking about the futures of higher education. Words like excellence, efficiency, entrepreneurship and employability saturate conversations about the work of universities – in policy and leadership circles, but also among students and families. This agenda may have served some postsecondary institutions well, but it has left many higher education systems in a rut of decreasing “ROI” (return on investment) and flailing purpose.

Flying the flag of sustainability is one useful rejoinder to this malaise. Renewed commitment to the civic role that the university can play in participatory democratic politics is another. Yet neither on their own will be sufficient to address the challenges presented by these new higher education policy languages, nor address the shift that has occurred from concerns about the economic impact of universities (a research focus across the last decades of the 20th century) to the current emphasis on the economic value of universities.

Looking to the future, we can see green economy innovations becoming increasingly prominent in the technology transfer work done by universities under the heading of entrepreneurship. We can also envision a continuation of the work being done by diversity, equity and inclusion advocates to reframe excellence and decolonise it. Similarly, there are signals that the efficiency imperatives which introduced so-called “market logics” to higher education are collapsing under their own misaligned weight, as policymakers and societies increasingly affirm higher education as a space apart. Channelling our optimism and outrage, we can envision higher education futures where more and more people recognise that the university as an institution should not and cannot be stamped into yet another corporate mould.

The role of universities in easing entry into the labour market is not something to be ignored. The increasingly common inclination to view higher education through a human capital and human resources prism needs to be challenged, but employability should not be put to the side. After all, students do attend universities because they and their families know that higher education study can be a promising route to rewarding and meaningful work.

The crucial – and too often missing – element is a more robust and more honest appreciation of how economic security is actually achieved. In fact, foregrounding this is our most promising route for successfully binding sustainability and civic engagement together with today’s acute emphasis on the economic value of the university (which is not likely to abate anytime soon).

Well-being and economic security do not simply come from waged labour in the formal economy. As UNESCO’s Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education report recently argued, they are provisioned in many different ways. For one, there is the care work done within households – which, when taken seriously, compels us to address gender disparities, elevate the importance of healthy childhoods and reimagine meaningful ways to age. There are also the common good resources of water, atmosphere and a verdant natural world that demand responsible stewardship. And there are the enabling infrastructures, both material and regulatory, that are provided by governments – most successfully, it seems, when there is partnership and public participation.

Entrenched interests and our traditionally compartmentalised approaches mitigate against such broader understandings of what provisions economic security. But here the university – precisely in its uniqueness, diversity and breadth – is ideally suited to take up this challenge and to support individuals, communities and societies in rethinking what it means to produce value in the first place.

We cannot overlook the real and legitimate future employment concerns of higher education students. But this has to go far beyond skills development, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), internships and workforce transition. Over the next three decades, complex interactions will re-shape the dynamics between care-work, common good resources, public infrastructures and the formal economy in regionally and locally distinct ways. Universities will need to step in and reframe employability in terms of overall economic provisioning, working this into higher education curricula and highlighting it as a crucial strand of academic knowledge production and mobilisation. This cannot be done without also centring sustainability and civic engagement so that when higher education students graduate from their universities, they are launched into lives of provisioning economic security for themselves, their families and their communities that include living well with others and with a more-than-human world.