Beaujolais Ed Nouveau: Decanting the importance of life long learning in the challenging, changing Europe of 2020

The modern European university as we know it is changing, has changed, and will continue to in order to adapt to modern needs and to what is happening around it. This process has been revealed by the huge upsurge in higher education reform programs, of quality assurance initiatives, of Higher Education (HE) league tables across the region and beyond, purporting to measure this-and-that all-vital “indicator†or “criterion.†The authors posit that all of these policy innovations have their merits, for each in its own way is beginning to move HE away from being an pedigreed acquired taste elixir for an elite, to a new and more palatable drink that is open not only to different partakers of all knowledge and skill varieties, but also enticing to a novice post-secondary learner attracted to try attractively bottled New World Beaujolais of Life-Long Learning courses and programs. This is seen generally as especially good news for fulfilling individual personal aspirations for professional and personal advancement as well as meeting knowledge societies' present and future needs of national prosperity, growth and stability. The accompanying downside of this positive development, the twinned phenomena of diploma inflation and job inflation, present a real threat to these real lifelong learning successes, however. To begin to unpack these intertwined phenomena will require that the authors first discern the real spirit or wine of lifelong learning in modern education and labour market circles and specifically how this, or indeed if this, is of any relevance to the process and function of HE generally and the modern university in particular.