Higher education in 2030

Higher education in 2030Having 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 crashpossibly bigger than 2008;