The Future of the University: Outlook for a Twenty-First-Century Economy

Abstract

Universities played a seminal role in the economy of the past century, a role that paralleled, to a large extent, the needs of nation-states, industrial production, and corporate management. In the twenty-first century, the structure and function of the contemporary university are changing rapidly in trying to keep up with knowledge-based economies and the demands of the times. Historically, the integrity of the modern university has been linked to promoting and protecting the idea of a national culture and catering to the local workforce. Now that the notion of the nation-state is declining and the nature of the workforce is morphing, universities are increasingly turning into transnational corporations, and the idea of national culture is being gradually replaced by a discourse of “excellence” driven more by global market forces and profit margins than thought and thought processes. This change was further escalated by the coronavirus pandemic, which, in many instances, appears to have gutted higher education. A number of colleges and universities across the world were forced to downsize or close their doors totally by the end of 2020. Others appear to have adapted rather quickly and made emergency investments in online technology to keep up with the mandates of the pandemic. This chapter takes a close look at the different roles the university has played historically and reviews the changing role of higher education over time. It also contemplates whether the university has reached the twilight of its social function or whether a new age is dawning with a renaissance of higher education. Certainly, higher education is not the only sector in which stakeholders are faced with the possibility of creative destruction to positively disrupt the way things are done. But while experiments with enhanced online instruction may offer opportunities for efficiency, the most important opportunity presented by the pandemic is the chance to rethink the political economy of the entire higher education system and reshape it to fit the challenges of the twenty-first century. To that end, the chapter proposes revamping university programs to focus more on the student/graduate and the skills needed in a twenty-first-century economy.