Work

Work, with its associated income, has been at the core of our societies and economies for millennia. But it has changed, and is changing, incredibly rapidly in terms of who is working, where work takes place and how work is done with what types of machines. The current changes in occupation types, work patterns and, in particular, the development of automated systems and artificial intelligence have a revolutionary flavour.

An example of the massive changes in the structure of work since the Second World War is the fact that today’s largest and most powerful companies didn’t then exist at all and are all in the information world and not manufacturing. Young people think of Google and Apple in the same way our generation thought of IBM and Kodak and our parents thought of GM and Ford.

But there will be much more change in the next couple of decades than in the previous century. Joseph Aoun, the President of North-Eastern University, has set all this out very clearly in his book – Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.² As he says:

The only real certainty is that the world will be different – and with changes come challenges as well as opportunities. In many cases they are one and the same. Education is what sets them apart.

Change is accelerating at a time when the university world, often seen as fairly left wing, retains a conservative mentality in respect of its institutional culture and professional practices. It tends to think in terms of small increments, though increasingly rapid major transformation is inevitable. Fairly small changes that would be seen in other sectors of society as modest are seen as exceptionally challenging and become difficult to achieve (though, nevertheless, universities have experienced and successfully implemented major change in the past three decades). But the process of change is not over and so any conservative state of mind needs to change rapidly. It is in part a consequence of flat, non-hierarchical and collegiate structures. Vice-Chancellors that succeed typically do so by influence rather than diktat. This collegiality is a positive quality at the core of all great universities and the key challenge or dilemma is how to accelerate change without diminishing that quality.

Communication and travel

The laptop and the mobile phone, with their supportive technologies, have utterly transformed our ability to communicate with each other across the world, with our friends and families and in the ways in which we live our ordinary lives, for example managing our money and doing our shopping.

We travel around the world for holidays and for work in ways that were unimaginable to our grandparents.

In almost every social context now, if one scans the room, one sees that almost everyone is glued to a mobile device. Put simply, the personal space of individuals has extended enormously from contact with people who are physically nearby to people who can be reached in a second across the world. Steve Jobs has changed the world at least as much as Henry Ford.

Families and social structure

In many countries, it is less than 50 years since homosexuality stopped being illegal. But now, in most countries, it is a generally accepted and welcomed part of modern life. In addition, because of the fact that people live far longer and because of the ways in which modern telecommunications have developed, the essential structure of families and society is changing. Many places of employment manifest exciting new approaches to gender equity across the workforce and there is a wider recognition that a fair society that fulfils its potential needs to ensure that everyone, irrespective of gender, race or sexuality, can fulfil their own potential. There is a long way to go but this is undoubtedly the journey the world is on.

Although most modern societies are more tolerant than their 19th-century forebears, there is still much to do, notably in the areas of cross-cultural and cross-religious understanding, both crucial arenas where university work should be part of the solution.

Better health and living longer

Medical advance is enabling most of us to live longer and better, which of course has big implications for our social welfare systems and the ways in which we organise work and leisure across our lives. This also has implications for the distribution of wealth across society.

The key demographic tendency in all Western countries, and now spreading across the world, is an ageing population as people live longer and birth rates reduce. Parents who are over 50 typically have significant capital wealth, including a family residence that has escalated massively in value, but their children often can’t enter the property market at the comparatively young age that their parents did. This leads to generational unfairness and often to understandable resentment.

The cost of care of elderly people is rising, even more so as new technologies, often developed in university, come into day to day use.

Major strategic issues surround the development of optimal systems of health and social care, which bring together both traditional medical sciences and the social sciences, economics and law, among others. Multidisciplinary universities are in a strong position to contribute solutions to this.

Arts, culture and cuisine

Most people are massively expanding their artistic and cultural experiences, including the food they eat and the clothes they wear.

The changes in working patterns, which we mention above, with increasing wealth, are likely to reduce working time and increase leisure time significantly over a lifetime. A high-level education increases the intellectual scope of individuals for a full intellectual embracement of cultural activities across society as a whole.

In this context, the study of arts and humanities, about which some voice doubts and to which many universities in the world do not give priority, will become more important, not less, in all societies and will be seen as crucial to the ongoing human journey as never before. Indeed, as Joseph Aoun points out as he makes the case for humans to strengthen their comparative advantage over machines in the economy:³

Creativity combined with mental flexibility has made humanity unique… They will continue to be how we distinguish ourselves as individual actors in the economy… The most important work that human beings perform will be its creative work. That is why our education should teach us how to do it well.

The study of arts and humanities is our means of archiving and reinterpreting the past, transmitting cultures, and giving individuals the ability to live reflective lives in conversation with past as well as present human knowledge and creativity.⁴ It initiates them into ongoing streams of culture and allows them to become full participants. This type of study has a very high utility for society, and indeed is increasingly important for the future of work in the changing environment. It is something that should very much be encouraged.

Poverty

Economic development across the world has dramatically reduced the levels of poverty and even famine, though of course enormous challenges remain. Optimistic thinkers, including Stephen Pinker,⁵ Bobby Duffy,⁶ Hans Rosling⁷ and Yuval Harari,⁸ among others, have huge confidence in the capacity of the human to succeed and overcome the challenges of the next century.

At the same time, developed economies have become less equal, with tiny numbers of people possessing an enormous proportion of the world’s assets and often not using their money and power well. Indeed, not only in the most advanced countries but also in countries that were regarded as part of the third world, the spread of affluence has increased, not decreased, financial equality, with huge wealth held by a few.

Climate change and energy use

Science has increasingly demonstrated that human behaviour is changing the climate of the world, slowly but steadily. This leads to enormous risks, particularly for communities vulnerable to climate change, and requires us to find and then use forms of energy that will reduce those risks.

It is particularly noteworthy that this area, more than any other, has seen what are loosely called ‘alternative truths’ in Europe, the UK and Australia.

In these countries, there is an increasingly vocal anti-climate-science voice on the right wing of politics which thrives on denigration of scientific opinion (in this and also other fields) and causes real fact confusion for many in the general public. This sentiment is driven, in the main, by a view that fossil fuel will continue to be essential as an energy source. For political or personal reasons, a significant subgroup, including some prominent media individuals, have felt able to ignore scientific evidence and even decry the scientific process as a whole. For example, Michael Gove, a senior UK politician, famously decried reliance on ‘experts’ in the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign in the UK. His views prevailed in the vote.

Universities have a crucial role to play in combating the view that ‘alternative truths’ are acceptable. Of course, universities are by their nature apolitical and, quite rightly, must give a forum to all views. But they must also promote proven science and this is sometimes a fine line to draw. It also makes it important for university researchers to accept that their audience is not only their scientific peers and therefore they need to engage proactively in sometimes robust and dishonest public policy debates and exchanges.

Global politics and conflict

Our politics and public life are now international, far more than ever in the past. Phenomena like migration and extremist political techniques like fake news and terrorism impact upon all of us.

Such changes, fundamental as they are, are relatively easy to describe retrospectively but their impacts are absolutely enormous. They range from causing industrial desolation in parts of Europe and areas like the mid-Western ‘rust belt’ in the US to stimulating immense mass migrations, provoked by a variety of social, environmental and economic transformations, and universalising violent political conflicts and bringing them directly into our communities.

Governments, and international institutions like the United Nations and the European Union, have tried to address parts of this process of change, and have tried to promote change in beneficial directions. The UN Millennium Development goals and the newer Sustainable Development Goals are both good illustrations, but there are many more.

However, so far, these efforts have been only partially successful and often seem to be well-meaning but ineffective, while at the same time the actual process of change is contentious. Simultaneously, the processes of globalisation, the increasing role of artificial intelligence, the ageing of society and transnational migration are very real and immediate and are often seen as negative in overall impact.

It should therefore be no surprise that, faced with the challenges that arise from these changes, millions of people across the world have used their political power to protest, in particular at the perceived failures of governments and institutions to deal with these challenges. Often the protests are purely symbolic and fairly small scale in numbers, such as the regular protest seen at the annual Davos meetings, the ‘Occupy movement’ and ‘Extinction Rebellion’.

But there have also been substantial political movements, so in the US, we see the Tea Party movement and then the election of Donald Trump; in Southern Europe, the rise of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain; in the UK, the progress of UKIP and then the Brexit referendum; and there are similar examples across the world. In general, the process is characterised by rejection of the political parties and mainstream ideologies that have governed us since the Second World War. And with that comes uncertainty and instability as people are crying out for solutions to the problems that they perceive.

A key tenet of populist movements is the lack of utility of ‘globalisation’ and the internationalist approach which has dominated global political culture over the past seven decades. Accentuated nationalism, growing calls for enhanced barriers to people movement, rising hostility to free trade and, in Trump’s America, even rising trade tariffs are all now everyday features of politics in a way that would have been unthinkable 15 years ago. ‘Nativist populism’ is an international issue in ways unseen since the Second World War. The confidence of several generations that a global mindset is now hard wired is under real practical threat. This has massive implications for universities which have been and still are absolutely committed to a global mindset and the development of global connectivity. They support and thrive on free movement of scholars, teachers and ideas.

In the round, universities have been marginal to this process of massive social and economic change while the values they represent have been attacked by politicians such as Donald Trump and Michael Gove, without a coherent overall response. Universities are indeed a key source of derision for those who disparage globalism and the concept of a liberal centre consensus in Western politics. Many of their critics argue that mass participation in higher education has harmed economies and devalued the academy.

Universities deal in knowledge. ‘Alternative truth’ politics is an attack on everything that they represent.

Despite universities’ undoubted contribution to many of the positive changes that have taken place, they have offered less in dealing with the dimensions of change that are big and threatening. They have been complacent in a worldview based on a healthy self-esteem. Thus it has been a real shock for university communities to begin to appreciate that they are not as well regarded externally as they regard themselves. The sector has been rife with hubris.

It is essential both for societies and for universities themselves that they work out the ways in which they can use their skills and knowledge to help societies deal with these potentially earth-shattering transformations.

Traditionally, universities are judge and jury of their own performance and could (sometimes unfairly) be characterised as ‘ivory towers’. That state of mind must be firmly relegated to the past because, in the future, society at large will increasingly be judge and jury and universities, as part of their mission, will have to perform in a way that seeks to exceed and not just meet or manage rising social expectations. Universities must face up to growing political and public scrutiny, which is both appropriate and inevitable in an era of massive public funding for universities.

For about 60 years after the end of the First World War, there was a boom in public money going into UK universities. This both drove up funding per student and fuelled the expansion of the sector. The unit of resource then declined from about 1980 to about 2000 and, since then, UK universities have once again experienced real growth in funding and the sources of funding have diversified. Though universities have sought to categorise the funding derived from income-contingent student loans as ‘private’ rather than ‘public’, the debate about university governance and accountability has been fuelled and has given rise to real tension. This has arisen across administrations with, for example, the Lambert review⁹ and the establishment of the Office for Fair Access (OFFA)¹⁰ and then even greater intervention through the new Office for Students established in the Higher Education and Research Act 2017. At the same time, universities have become very large institutions driven by international income for both research and students. Many universities are now institutions linked to their city rather than being institutions of their city. Big money, globalisation and a lack of community strategy have exposed an attitude of mind and vulnerability in university leadership teams.

The effect of this steady process of change is that the activities and behaviours of universities are four-square part of the public debate. One of the issues we consider in this book is whether the current balance is right.

Many of the issues that need legitimate public debate are complex and mired in political disagreement. The controversies about such issues as genetic modification of food, or the alleged link between vaccination and autism, ought to be capable of scientific evaluation. While issues such as these are complex and require scientific input, the loss of public confidence in scientists by a significant proportion of the general public creates major policy challenges, which are ethical and sociological. The debates on these matters are not only for government and politics; universities and science must play a full and accountable role in the public debate.

Research

There are two developing aspects of university research policy that will become increasingly significant as countries consider how policy should evolve, and funding should be distributed. These are the highly variable distribution of the quality of research across different universities and the way in which research impacts upon addressing the overall challenges that are faced by society as a whole.

Even within the UK, let alone across the world, the quality of research is highly variable. Of the UK’s approximately 160 universities only about 50 would have a good claim to be producing substantial amounts of world-class research in many departments/areas – that is to say research that provides genuine understanding of the changing world.

Though it is true that there are islands of real excellence in a wider group of universities, the fact is that research excellence is very concentrated and a large number of universities cannot really be truthfully described as research-excellent in cumulative terms.

This skewed distribution is reflected in the various world rankings that are regularly published, in the distribution of research funding from both state and private sources, and in the informal but powerful assessments of academics themselves. It is also seen in the quality and power ranking of the very detailed UK research exercise, the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which in varying forms has been carried out every five years through several cycles and then funds much of UK university research. Australia has a roughly similar assessment exercise, which also reveals striking asymmetries of institutional research strength, that is concentrated in 8 of the 39 universities.

Similar variability is the case in all OECD countries. And, even though there is plenty of room for scepticism about how accurately the world university rankings reflect research capacity and the extent to which research citations reflect quality, the fact that in every country some universities are seen as research-leading and others are not cannot be denied.

In some countries, such as Germany, this truth is reflected in the institutional arrangements for organising and funding research (with the development of an elite research university stream), but in others the overall narrative of university education is not yet ready openly to acknowledge this variability. For example, the situation in France is rapidly changing to follow this pattern. There are, of course, a variety of alternative models including, in some cases, direct funding. Others, such as the UK, have evolved this through carefully calibrated policies on the basis that excellence should be funded wherever it is found, which has driven concentration in a relatively small number of universities.

The debate is typically phrased in terms of the crucial role of research-led teaching, which implies that high quality education and teaching is only feasible in an environment where quality research is also being undertaken. This concept, at the heart of the Western university tradition as we describe in Chapter 2, underpins the view that research and teaching in university must always co-exist and ideally be undertaken by the same person. This view is the philosophical driver for the suggestion that all universities should be research-active in all the areas in which they teach, even though this clearly does not reflect existing reality.

So, in the UK, for example, ‘academic drift’ towards research has characterised many new universities, former colleges of advanced technology, former polytechnics, and former colleges of art or education as they have acquired university status. Indeed, any suggestion that research should be confined to a limited number of universities has been very strongly resisted as it is maintained that research is essential to good quality university teaching in all universities.

It is also true that, over the past 30 years, traditional universities have responded to the challenges from non-research universities, such as the former polytechnics, by establishing business schools and professional training in fields such as nursing and there has been some mission creep towards applied subjects.

The massive and economically important strength of the UK’s research, for example, is concentrated in about a third of our universities. If no research were to take place in the other two thirds, the overall damage would be quite limited.

As this variability continues to become clearer, the narrative of the relationship between research and teaching will have to change and the structure of universities will change. This may involve a recognition that even a wealthy country like the UK can support only a limited number of research-intensive universities.

One bar to this process is that esteem in academic life has been almost totally research-driven. Any rebalancing would require institutions to improve recognition and esteem for the outstanding university educator.

The second evolving change is the growing significance of ‘impact’ in deciding which research to fund and which not to fund. The existence of ‘impact’ as a criterion for funding research has been resisted by many in academic life, but is gradually becoming accepted. In a number of countries, including the UK, major government research funding has been focused more on major national and international priorities requiring research at scale than on the traditional research of funding good projects in any area that is shown to be excellent through peer review. This process also drives concentration of expertise at major new centres such as The Francis Crick Institute in London.

The reasons for the resistance to impact are not just conservative opposition to change of any kind. There are worries that such a criterion for state funding might suppress original or challenging thinking (‘blue sky’ as referred to earlier) or might inhibit ‘academic freedom’. In other words, it might impose a crassly utilitarian template on academia.

And it is also true that it is difficult to fix properly the metrics that can measure ‘impact’. This is perhaps easier in fields like medicine and engineering than the social sciences or humanities, but any metrics are bound to be controversial, refined though they have been over time.

Nevertheless, the idea of ‘impact’ is becoming better established and more accepted and will spread more and more widely as a criterion for determining the location of both public and private funding for research.

Universities should organise themselves in the best possible way to help us all understand and interpret the process of change in the world in which we live, and then to offer approaches that would harness the process of change for general benefit. As well as changes unique to particular institutions, this will involve new types of international partnerships.

A great deal of thought will be needed to find the best ways to do that. The variability of research quality and the significance of ‘impact’ will be at the centre of that consideration.

Success on this journey will go some way towards restoring public confidence in the value of their universities. Universities are not owned only by current communities of staff and students. It is dangerous to neglect the major national investment over many generations that has made these institutions succeed.

Teaching and learning

Despite these questions about the future of research, a far greater concern is the quality and utility of teaching and learning.

Again, the nature of these concerns varies widely across the world, and is very much related to the function of universities in particular countries. But the determination of national political and economic elites to get their children’s university education in countries like the US, the UK and Australia is evidence of their doubts about the teaching quality of their own country’s universities.

And, in the OECD countries, concern about teaching quality is very high too. This comes from students, who often now have to pay substantial fees and want to be sure of the quality of what they have paid for (potentially using their power as consumers with the legislative strength that gives them); from employers who want to get the highest quality recruits; and from governments who want to ensure the quality of the graduating population, which is getting towards 50% of the age cohort in some countries. Another pressure for governments is convincing young people in or about to enter voting age groups that they have had or will get economic utility – or value for money – from their own educational investment. This concern remains a substantial component of contemporary policy debate about university education.

These pressures cast a light on the indisputable fact that universities and their academic staff have generally been more focused on their research interests (which still dominate university world rankings) and are diverting money that they receive for their teaching to fund their research in considerable amounts.

These tensions have led to development of ‘student satisfaction surveys’ and are leading to new government approaches, such as the ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’ in the UK, which are designed to measure teaching quality.

To address these issues in the UK, a new regulator with dramatically enhanced powers, the Office for Students (OfS), has recently been established. With its system of formal regulatory powers it has sought to distinguish itself from its predecessor body, HEFCE, which was viewed as ‘of the sector, and for the sector’. The advent of the OfS brings with it the prospect of a significant reduction of university autonomy in England. In contrast, Australia’s powerful new accreditation agency, TEQSA,¹³ adopts a lighter touch, nearer to the traditional UK model.

As attempts to measure teaching quality at school level have shown, such efforts are fraught with difficulty, particularly if the teaching quality metric becomes a performance indicator that determines future funding and such issues.

The concept of ‘value-added’, another government obsession in England, is particularly difficult to measure.

Nevertheless, this discussion heralds the change that has already begun, and will keep coming, to raise the standard of teaching in universities.

Anyone who does not recognise this has their head in the sand.

This will have a particularly big impact at Year 1 of university life, where there is increasing pressure to ensure that all university students are well educated across both arts and sciences, and fully equipped, for example in statistics and logic, as advocated by Professor Steven Pinker, to play their full roles in national life. A particular problem for countries like the US and UK is the relatively low level of mathematical literacy where many young people lack even a basic competency.

This takes on particular significance in a country like England where early specialisation in the English school system is a particular problem and the ‘A’ Level system, driven by university entrance demands, is far narrower than the ‘baccalaureate’ approaches of most other countries.

But also at Year 4, master’s qualifications (typical structure in England, honours year equivalent in Scotland and Australia), which are an important source of income for universities, are decreasingly seen as simply a route to a PhD and academic study and increasingly as an educational development that better develops the student for modern working life. However, both the funding arrangements and the university commitment to master’s degrees will need to change if this trend is to develop properly.

The increasing prominence of both early and midlife postgraduate courses and qualifications aimed at career enhancement will be complemented by a further strengthening of e-education programmes.

And, in the world of change in which we live, a qualification at the age of 22 will no longer be sufficient for a career for life. Individuals, and their employers, need continuous professional development and, more widely, citizens live in a world where lifelong learning is essential.

From the outset, universities have offered some of this, but lifelong learning will need to become an increasingly important, even central, component of universities’ teaching responsibilities. Often, this will be in partnership with an organisation such as the civil service in the UK or with industry.

Overall, the challenge of teaching quality will not go away nor should it. Teaching provides the greatest source of income for universities and getting this right will remain a big challenge for them. To the public at large, of all the things that universities do, teaching is undoubtedly the most important. The general reader may be surprised that there is a need to say this because, for many years, it has not been the case inside some of the greatest universities.

Financing it all

The finance of universities is changing rapidly across the world.

Difficult and controversial judgments are being made, in the fields of funding both for research and for teaching, as to the best balance between payments by the state, by the student and, to a limited extent, by employers.

There is not a stable funding state where everyone can be confident that the existing system will go on forever. In many countries there are political and economic challenges which lead to potential funding instability. In countries like the UK and Australia, where international students have been an important source of income, the development of high quality universities across the world, as well as political concerns about immigration, jeopardise that source of income.

We discuss these issues in detail in Chapter 8 but it is important to note here that, at the end of the day, the framework of university funding can only be created by government, and such a framework needs to foster and encourage the kind of university contribution to addressing a changing world that we have described earlier in this chapter. That will mean variability and flexibility of courses, teaching, modes of learning and research structures and modes of learning. Also there is no more certain way to ensure a mediocre university system than to underfund it.

We would also argue that, as far as possible, the funding systems should enable universities to be independent of government.

One danger of over-reliance on direct student funding rather than a mixed model with a component of government contribution from the tax base is that the student sees themselves as a customer, with almost a guaranteed academic grade. Put simply, it may be possible to buy a first class education but no student should ever be able to buy a first class degree. That should always be earned, despite the claims of some who have taken their disappointment to the courts.

Systems and structures

As we describe in Chapter 2, the university systems of every country have grown in rather haphazard ways, reflecting the education, training and societal imperatives of the time.

There are now about 160 universities in the UK. These have very different provenances. There are major mergers, such as that which created the modern Manchester University in 2004, while speculation about potential acquisitions, and also university closures, is perpetual.

New universities are regularly being formed as the private sector plays an increasing role. Since 2000, there have been regular government changes in the definition of the right to University title and degree awarding status.

The new UK Higher Education and Research Act of 2017 has as a key objective the establishment of a wider range of universities including more private providers.

In considering these important developments, the distinction between public and private universities may not be key but that between profit and not-for-profit providers may be more significant.

Great universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard, Stanford and Princeton are private institutions. Other universities, for example those stemming from the Land Grant in the US and the former polytechnics in the UK, are more ‘public’ in character but they are all committed to public service and the public interest and to charitable purposes.

However, the newly emerging for-profit private universities, such as BPP and the University of Law in the UK, should have to demonstrate their public service commitment and value and it is not evident that the new regulatory regime really enables this to happen in a transparent way.

The creation of new qualifications, such as foundation degrees and degree apprenticeships and the waxing and waning of new institutions like Sector Skills Councils, reflect uncertainties about the best institutional arrangements to meet the skills challenges that a modern economy faces.

And this fluidity takes place against a constant background of concern about the unfairness of the distribution of university opportunities, where it remains the case that a young person’s chance of higher education remains sharply dependent upon their socio-economic background.

Change in the national structure of universities is certainly happening. It is for discussion what process of change in universities will best foster their contribution to national welfare.

The international context

Finally, none of these current changes, and consideration of those that are necessary in the future, can be thought about in a purely national context.

It remains difficult to explain why US, UK, Australian and Canadian universities have been so dominant in the world university rankings, in comparison with those in other OECD countries and the rest of the world. No doubt, part of the explanation is the shared English language, which helps to create networks, and the essential autonomy of universities in these countries.

And this dominance is beginning to be challenged, notably as a result of the enormous commitment in China and university reorganisation in Europe.

However, this book is not systematic in its analysis of universities throughout the world. Its main references are to the situation in the UK and, to some extent, in Australia and the US, but only to a very limited extent elsewhere in the world. A comprehensive analysis would certainly be valuable and would offer important insights. However, we decided that the challenge of doing this properly is beyond the scope of this book.

Universities are more international than ever before and, indeed, it could well be argued that the process of globalisation has moved faster in the field of universities than any other. It extends to research, teaching and knowledge transfer and it is accelerating.

An important component of the change is massive expansion across the world and travel of students around the globe.

Modes of study are changing with distance learning and online education and so different forms of pedagogy are now well established. New paradigms of learning are also inevitably becoming more international and less focused on traditional ways of doing things.

These changes will have an impact on the structure of universities and their funding.

We analyse these changes in more detail throughout the book.