IMAGINING universities of the future
Countries are not only battling each other for the world’s best minds, they are rethinking what education looks like (and it’s less about leafy campuses and giant exam rooms)
‘These things always start with budget cuts, don’t they?” Baroness Diana Warwick said with a wry, not-quite-cynical smile over a cup of tea in the restaurant of an Ottawa hotel.
She was explaining how tuition fees of more than $15,000 a year became the poster child for change in higher education in a country once known as the birthplace of the welfare state.
But the former head of the umbrella group Universities UK might as easily have been talking about the reason she was in Ottawa this late June morning: a conference organized to discuss the forces sweeping post-secondary education around the world.
No, a shortage of money was not the whole story almost 100 university executives from around the world had to tell each other.
A second narrative was the money some countries are willing to spend in an increasingly competitive global market for students, researchers and knowledge.
And a third involved rapidly changing expectations — by students, parents, industry and governments — of what their money ought to deliver.
With the title “Canadian universities in a global context: A dialogue on international trends and opportunities,” the conference might sound more like a lecture to sleep through than a wake-up call. But organizers — the University of Alberta and Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada — have reason to hope the latter is what they delivered. For what’s going on beyond our borders makes the Canadian status quo sound a bit like the Hobbits’ blissfully unaware shire before Bilbo found the dark lord’s ring.
The budget cuts to which Warwick refers were introduced two years ago by Britain’s new coalition government. The U.K.’s university sector found itself in the crosshairs because a government looking for major savings had other priorities for the money it did have, she said, citing — as if to give Canadians a familiar point of reference — the “huge ring fence around our health service.”
Realizing that doing nothing would mean letting Britain’s renowned university system go into decline, however, they decided the “least-worst option” was to make up the lost revenue by boosting the contribution of students in conjunction with a generous loan scheme.
Of course, the new tuition numbers remain controversial. But Warwick said the upward pressure on tuition, which actually began a decade ago, has led to a new public appreciation that university delivers a private as well as public good.
A clear national consensus on the importance of higher education is producing an even more radical result to Canadian eyes in Germany: a constitutional amendment giving more power to the federal government.
Horst Hippler, president of the German Rectors’ Conference and another leading participant at the Ottawa meeting, said under current law the central government in Berlin is forbidden to subsidize university budgets, leaving the responsibility to provinces that in many cases can’t afford it.
He said there is all-party consensus about giving Berlin the right to contribute to operating budgets, as well as research.
The ferment in Germany is even leading to a re-evaluation of curriculum, one that steps back from single-minded concentration on technical and professional expertise, and instead recognizes that young employees may be better prepared if they have taken an extra year of study, been introduced to a wider range of subjects, and have spent some time studying abroad.
Hippler, himself a former president of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, calls this “developing the personality,” while other conference participants call it acquiring “soft skills.” But to an earlier generation of Canadians, at least, these concepts will sound similar to the benefits once ascribed to a liberal-arts education — benefits not often mentioned these days by Canadian leaders.
And Hippler said this change is being driven not so much by universities as by industry, which has come to highly value the ability “to express yourself, to discuss, to make your point, to accept if you are wrong, to accept that there are different ways to the same solution.”
The keynote speaker at the Ottawa conference was Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University. The change he focused on — perhaps the most radical of all — is the shift away from the traditional, full-time, campus-based model of education.
In a country identified by bigname private and state schools, Aoun said only 15 per cent of American undergraduate students today get their education from that exclusive, extremely expensive model associated with collegiate sports and Norman Rockwell images of residential campuses.
The vast majority are now parttimers, older students, working adults seeking to upgrade their education and individuals whose location and circumstances make distance education their only option, said Aoun, whose university specializes in such learners, and in providing work experience — often overseas — as part of the package.
He calls this transformation “the rise of the rest,” and said the needs and expectations of this non-traditional cohort do not fit with a model that never particularly worried about how things turned out for graduates in later life. Perhaps this sounds as if it is leading to heavy reliance on technological innovation to reach more students at a cheaper price point, perhaps via more of the “MOOCs,” or “massive open online courses” now being experimented with at such places as Stanford University in California.
But Aoun said the key is a concentration on what students want and need, be that the leafy campuses of the past or the online alternatives that are increasingly fashionable to talk about these days.
The vast majority of American students are now part-timers, older students, working adults seeking to upgrade their education and individuals whose location and circumstances make distance education their only option.
And what of China? The challenge it presents to smaller competitors with much looser, less purposefully organized systems, such as Canada’s, becomes clear in the blink of a few huge numbers.
The country now has more than 2,000 research institutions, a combined student enrolment of 31.6 million, and a deeply rooted cultural imperative that makes many Chinese families treat the education of offspring as the sort of lifetime financial project that Canadians make of home ownership.
At both the individual and system levels, the Chinese have deliberate national agendas. On the former, there are now about a million Chinese studying overseas, a reality that is rooted in much more than transient government preference.
And Yang Xinyu, deputy secretary general of the Chinese Scholarship Council, said the highachieving students her state organization sends abroad constitute only about 10 per cent of the total at any one time, with the balance financed by private families whose new wealth and demand for access to the most elite institutions outstrips domestic capacity. And at the macro level, China’s strategic approach to education also leaves Canada in its wake. At the apex of those 2,000 institutions are the 39 members of the “985 project,” under which the Beijing government set out to build world-class universities. First two institutions, and ultimately 39, were targeted as places at which to concentrate research and elite scholars and students with the greatest potential.
In Canada, by contrast, the mere idea of singling out a few lead institutions seems to send paralyzing shivers down the political spine.
Of course, one way or another, few of these themes are entirely missing from the Canadian picture. In Quebec, attempts to solve a budget crisis with tuition increases have roiled the province’s political life in a very British way. And in Alberta, the provincial government has been nudging institutions toward the sort of regional co-ordination German counterparts have already embraced.
“We were trying to introduce some of the rich experiences from other systems around the world into the Canadian discussions,” U of A’s provost Carl Amrhein said of the thinking behind the conference he helped organize. “The rise of China, Brazil and India as major systems of PSEs [post-secondary institutions] on the world stage present many opportunities for Canadian universities and colleges.“
Even in Australia, a country that may seem more comparable to Canada than some of the bigger players, the University of Melbourne recently overhauled and refocused itself, choosing to concentrate on core programs over professional schools, weaning itself off a traditional association with the children of the well off.
Does Canada need a stronger, more strategic, national focus — and can that be accomplished without it becoming a divisive federal project?
Are Canadian universities sufficiently accountable to all stakeholders — parents, students, employers, governments — for the life outcomes of the education they deliver?
Does government have a right to have an opinion about what universities do with the money they provide?
Do we think enough about the central role higher education plays in building a stronger, more prosperous country?
Are we at risk of second-class status if we don’t respond?
In Britain, Warwick said the Liberal-Democrats — junior party in the current coalition government — could have a tough time in the next election because they reneged on promises to reject tuition increases. This is not an example likely to encourage risktaking on the foregoing questions by many politicians and university leaders. But Warwick said the Liberal-Democrats’ struggles could mean that higher education will have a prominent place in public debate during the next British vote.
That’s a silver lining Canadians might envy, even if they don’t fancy the way it was achieved.