The Future of Higher Education: Some Human Challenges

Higher education is subject to several disruptive forces in the last few years: budget cuts; declining registrations in many subjects; a crisis in the humanities; a growing skepticism about its usefulness; a sense of disenchantment from the standard academic career path; distance learning; free online courses; micro-accreditation and alternative paths to academic degrees; commercialization; and most recently artificial intelligence. Most literature dealing with the future of higher education deals with one of these phenomena, sometimes with a few of them. What is lacking is a macro, or bird’s eye view, of the whole system, trying to foresee the road ahead, shaped by these forces and by the prevailing mood and attitudes, and imagining where a new equilibrium might be. It seems quite obvious that the current turmoil may cause this important branch of human activity to be inexorably drawn into a whirlpool, spiraling rapidly down, resulting in one of two possible solutions—either a collapse of the higher education system as we know it today, or a new equilibrium which, almost by definition, means a reengineered system. This paper will present the author’s concept of an equilibrium of the higher education system, one that will be stable for a period. To reach the foreseen new equilibrium, two critical factors are needed: a political leadership that understands the importance of the issues at stake and, on the other hand, academic leadership capable of transcending the narrow view and cooperating, without condescension, with society at large. The political issues are beyond the scope of this paper; an outline of the desired academic leadership will be presented.