At the start of a new academic year, it is worth reflecting that Higher Education is facing a future that is both more challenging than at any point in the last century but also presents more opportunities for innovative organisations than ever before. The very nature of higher education, how it is delivered, and the role of universities in society and the economy is going to change significantly over the next decade.

This change will be driven by a combination of competitive, demographic and regulatory forces that are only now starting to emerge. The sector is entering a period of real uncertainty, and many institutions are not yet ready to exploit the opportunities or protect themselves from the forces impending. Universities are facing a stark decision – make the right choice, embrace the new opportunities and succeed, or make the wrong choice and get left behind. This is truly a tipping point.

A few weeks ago, The Futures Academy orchestrated a workshop exploring “University Futures” in advance of a Strategic Foresight Exercise for a particular university in Ireland. Somewhat arbitrarily, here below are a few of the findings. (They are unoriginal, haphazard and times contradictory, being directly borrowed from the participants and the sources they used).

• The higher education model of lecturing, cramming and examination has barely changed for centuries. Now, three disruptive waves are threatening to upend established ways of teaching and learning. First, a funding crisis has created a shortfall that the universities brightest brains are struggling to solve. Second, the technological revolution is challenging higher education’s business model, with an explosion in online learning, much of it free, meaning that the knowledge once imparted to a lucky few has been released to anyone with a smart phone or laptop. And third, these financial and technological disruptions coincide with the transition from universities in the past only educating a tiny elite now having the responsibility for training and retraining workers throughout their careers.
• In teaching and learning, the era of universities providing three-year degrees with little differentiation in experience or pricing will come to an end. The institutions that take informed risks with their programme design, and target their investments to their strengths and the market demand will be successful.
• University departmental fiefdoms will be broken up to support the interdisciplinary efforts needed to create innovative solutions to major societal problems. Meeting great challenges depends on expertise from all the sciences and humanities, and bureaucratic and cultural barriers to problem-focused research must, and will, be removed.
• The de-Balkanisation of university departments will result in Health 101 becoming the most popular course. Advances in biology, medicine, psychology and nutrition will combine to offer stronger prescriptions for the care of oneself and one’s children that everyone will need to know about. Students will learn a range of basic disciplinary theories in an applied context, so that they can see the personal relevance.
• Competition for research funding will intensify as institutions focus their efforts on being world-class in a smaller number of domains, and research capital is increasingly competed globally. Universities which seek success in attracting funding and talent will need to be adept at creating mutual value propositions with a diverse partnership network comprising global and local academic and corporate institutions.
• Rather than being stand-alone academic institutions, universities will also need to become ever more integrated into the economy, with real commercial awareness and relationship management capability in order to thrive.
• The watchword is “Digital”. Universities will have to be digital in everything they do. Embedding digital across all university departments: estates and facilities/procurement/IT/HR/faculties and schools/ marketing/library/international office/admissions/finance/student services – everything! The game has changed. Permanently! Digital is here and it’s here to stay.
• Innovations in Educational Technology are offering universities new opportunities to improve teaching and learning; one major advantage being analytics and big data. Learning analytics can offer invaluable indicators, such as how an individual student is engaging with their course content, and how whole classes are progressing. Learning analytics allow lecturers to gain up-to-the-minute insights into how their students are working, providing opportunities to tweak and tailor their approach, and even offer personalised learning recommendations to individuals, helping them to get the best academic results and a rewarding university experience. Universities are in a race to “flip the classroom”; embracing electronically enhanced “active learning”.
• Digital disruption is everywhere, as more and more universities establish massive open online courses, offering their best professors to a universal public through global online platforms, entirely free of charge. But is this a revolution with long-term, transformational consequences?
• Notwithstanding, universities need to differentiate themselves through new and emerging business models. They fail to appreciate that they don’t need a digital strategy as such, but a business strategy that is fit for the digital age.
• Exams that emphasise mastery of taught knowledge will no longer be the primary tool for judging student performance. Instead, assessments will evaluate how well students are prepared for future learning – which is the point of the university anyway!
• Devices will replace many academic faculty by 2030! The concept of individual campuses will slowly disappear. Year-round learning will replace terms and semesters. The adoption of technological innovation will be incentivised by the urgent need to make education more affordable. Salaries and benefits are the single biggest cost in all university budgets, but since considerably fewer academics will be required in the technological future, the inflationary pressure this imposes on tuition fees will be eased. Much academic research, largely externally funded, will take place in “community” labs situated in technology zones where academics can enjoy facilities like digital start-ups. Aggressive competition will be the order of the day.
• Research programmes will have a stronger test against return on investment, and teaching programmes will have a strong link with the needs of global trends and society at large.
• Students will be actively involved with universities from school-age through new digital platforms and mature technologies such as Client Relationship Management.
• Some changes over the next 15 years will be incremental and others transformative. One incremental change is that participation in higher education will grow everywhere, despite the flattening of average graduate starting salaries. Those who leave education at 16 or 17 will find it even harder to embark on a career. Sharp-eyed university leaders will entice students with new work experience-based offerings and German-style technical and vocational programmes. But the real game changer will not be vocational education. Still less will it be the wholesale adoption of massive open online courses in place of pedagogies. Neither the lecture theatre nor the campus will fade into history. There will be one big transformation: viable measures of comparative student learning outcomes, including value added between enrolment and graduation. These measures will be as revolutionary in their effects as global research rankings have been. They will quickly overshadow the subjective consumerist metrics derived from student satisfaction and student engagement surveys, enabling national and international comparisons of student achievement, and pull attention away from crude instrumental measures of outcomes and back towards the core processes of knowledge and intellectual formation.  

My own personal vision for the University of the Future is that it will be interdisciplinary. Traditional departmental structures are preventing research and education from evolving. Structures and labels are important for bringing order to confusion, providing a sense of direction and purpose. But they can lose their value as the world changes around them. In an environment where interdisciplinary research is growing in importance, dividing universities by academic departments creates barriers not benefits. Academics cling to departments for a sense of identity. They provide stability as a store of resources and a physical home. But these monolithic silos are blocking the next phase in the evolution of academe. Open flexible boundaries are likely to become increasingly important for academics and students alike.