Reshaping Universities for Survival in the 21st Century: New Opportunities and Paradigms

This chapter outlines the challenges which have affected universities in the last few decades - from the globalisation of financial and labour markets to the knowledge economy and the digital revolution. It explains how factors such as neoliberalism, marketisation and competition undermine the monopoly previously enjoyed by universities. It traces the roots of university missions from the Middle Ages to the present day, and looks at how the dominance of marketisation, competition, and neoliberalism collide with the traditional idea of universities. It analyses the impact of global trends on universities in the 21st century, such as university rankings, competition for funding, corporatisation, and the threat of new entrants into the market. The globalised economy and global expansion of the knowledge industry has also eroded the monopolistic position previously enjoyed by universities. Advances in information and communication technologies is becoming critical as they transform teaching and learning, and fundamentally alter the way that universities offer and deliver programs. Neoliberalism has been embraced by governments throughout the world to reform and re-position their national economies to respond to global competition. The resultant neoliberal reforms corporatised the public sector, especially universities because of their potential economic contribution through development of human capital, research and innovation. With corporatization, increased accountabilities and competition, university managements impose greater controls over academic work and behaviours. The chapter also provides a summary of the changing landscape in higher education which includes: growth in student enrolments, increased student diversity, new sources of revenue; and new types of activities.

This chapter highlights how the increasingly knowledge-driven global economy has made university education ever more important. In the knowledge economy, employment security has been disappearing. The kinds of workforce needed must be flexible, adaptive and multi-skilled, able to keep up with the pace of global changes. However, due to the slowness of replacement of the existing workforce with a new generation of workers, lifelong learning is the only practical way to create the required new skill-sets. As such, the employability of individuals depends on their transportable knowledge and skills gained through a high level university education, which enables them to be flexible and have an increased propensity to learn continuously. Universities are themselves transformed by the knowledge economy with growth of student enrolments and increasing internationalisation. The growth of university enrolments is not limited to onshore students; there are various forms of transnational education and growth in universities’ international branch campuses. The United States has the longest tradition of setting up branch campuses with recent developments from Australia and United Kingdom. While there has been a proliferation of international branch campuses, there has been a shift in host countries from the Middle East to Asia, especially in China and Singapore. Globalisation, universal access and growth in higher education have placed significant demands on universities to develop new models to service growing and diverse student needs at a time when resources are strained. With increasing competition, there are unintended consequences such as escalating tuition fees, rising student debts when universities are increasing their spending on marketing and branding activities.

The increasing focus on international university rankings reflects the fact that global competitiveness is ever more driven by knowledge. The ranking systems condense a vast amount of information and data collected to measure the knowledgeproducing and talent-catching capacity of universities. Easy-to-recall league tables facilitate communication to stakeholders and customers. However, ranking systems emphasise vertical differences between institutions while masking their horizontal differences. There are enormous differences in methodology in ranking criteria, weightings, proxies for quality, choice of indicators, data sources, and use of surveys. The more prominent ranking agencies include the Times Higher Education which focuses more on international reputation, combining subjective inputs, and quantitative data. The ARWU focuses exclusively on objective indicators. The validity of some of these measurements is sometimes questionable, and there appears to be a bias towards larger institutions which have greater resources and stronger reputations. Nevertheless, the rankings have highlighted reputational differentiation and intensified competition for students, faculty, funding and researchers. More importantly, rankings impact on institutional strategic policy and direction as well as university missions. Increasingly, the visibility and influence of a global university is measured less by the size of its physical campus or the importance of its home city, than by its presence and prominence on the Web. The Webometrics Ranking of Universities offers an alternative ranking system that rates universities based on their Web presence and accessibility.

This chapter looks at the explosive increase in the creation of data in recent decades. The digital universe is estimated to be of the order of a billion trillion (1021) bytes. All the advanced knowledge required for undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees is housed somewhere inside the Web. Not only does the Web become an indispensable supplement to the part played by lecturers, in some instances, it constitutes the core curricula of some university degrees. With the Web housing virtually unlimited amounts of knowledge reachable by a variety of devices, the key is to find efficient means of identifying and accessing them. While search engines help to narrow down the right kind of knowledge on the Web, the ability to produce answers from them still requires considerable human judgement. Consequently, these engines are still not designed to be used directly and automatically for instructional purposes. The chapter also looks at the possibility of developing an automatic system which is able to answer questions, and so replace the role of the human lecturer. A recent breakthrough which seriously threatens the job of the university lecturer has arrived in the form of Watson. The Massive Open Online Courses have the advantages of ubiquitous anytime learning offering great flexibility but they do not have the capability to fully replace the conventional physical lecture room with its face-to-face interaction and hands-on laboratory experiments.

This chapter looks at the changing relationship between the students and the universities with increased marketisation of higher education. As students are increasingly viewed as customers, academic education is reduced to student satisfaction surveys, quality control, performance measures, quantification of the student experience, and ranking and league tables. Critics have argued that commodification of education leads to standardisation, formulaic teaching, and reducing quality into quantity, intellectual rigour into customer service. Universities have embraced the market logic of growth, competition and commercial techniques in promoting and encouraging academic capitalism and entrepreneurship. There is also a change in university governance reflecting the change in the dynamics of the three determining forces: the state authority, the market and the academe. The spread of neoliberalism and new public management have resulted in a market-oriented model of governance. In this model, the institutional balance of power resides with the senior management who has greater control in the selection and appointment of academic personnel. With the strengthening of managerial control and weakening of academic affiliation, universities are moving away from the traditional idea of academic self-governance and the Humboldtian idea of a university. Universities are increasingly required to align institutional priorities with national economic and social goals. Consequently, there is a mixture of demands, including clearer accountability to society; contribution to equity and expanded access; ensuring quality of teaching and learning are relevant to learner and market needs; research feeding into industry and community engagement; and contributing to internationalisation and international competitiveness. As a result, academic freedom is under threat from this new form of institutional governance.

This concluding chapter offers solutions to universities to help students to succeed in the 21st century. To this end, universities have to create real value for students - equip them with employable skills to be entrepreneurial, innovative, and adaptable in the volatile job market. And above all, universities have to help students to learn how to learn in order to keep up with the technological race and develop the critical abilities to respond to continuous changes in the labour market and technology. For example, universities need to integrate new-media literacy into education programs; introduce experiential learning which helps students to develop the soft skills, such as the ability to collaborate, work in groups, read social cues, and respond adaptively. Furthermore, universities need to integrate interdisciplinary training that allows students to develop skills and knowledge in a range of subjects. For their part, universities should take lessons from other industry leaders, embrace technology, and benefit from neuroscience research. Above all, universities should get leaner and more productive with administrative efficiency, agility and responsiveness to trim their cost structure. They need to transform their old business model to meet the challenges of the 21st century. They may also have to look at the global market to remain relevant. While the current climate uses higher education as a means to enhance global competitiveness, universities must maintain their critical business, promoting critical thinking, self-reflection and critical action and stay true to their academic missions.