The pervasive sense that five years or a decade or 20 years hence the sector will look radically different might be an exciting topic for panel discussions but it’s not clear whether radical transformation is desirable – not least because the form that transformation might take remains far from clear.
The drivers of change are well-rehearsed: while demand remains strong for higher education participation, as we’ll be exploring at our Secret Life of Students event this week, the traditional student experience is coming under intense pressure as students with diverse backgrounds, needs and aspirations try to wedge their lives into a fairly boilerplate model of higher education study. Most institutions don’t have the money to throw at additional services, or to carry the risks of innovating in how they structure their portfolio. Income from international students could go some way to smoothing out the rough edges but recent events have demonstrated the consequences of building a system on an income stream that’s so variable and subject to a change of direction in the political winds.
The Westminster government’s current higher education policy agenda is a rag bag of “stuff we can all agree on” like access, quality, and civic engagement, and contextual mood music around industrial strategy, skills, devolution, and regional economic growth. Reading between the lines it seems there is a direction of travel towards a more coordinated regional post-18 offer broadly aligned to regional economic growth agendas, but against a punishing economic backdrop nobody’s very clear what this ought to look like, how deeply or broadly it should touch the general HE offer, or how it should happen.
The lack of system-wide or even local coordination is a real worry, as individual institutions make decisions for sustainability and even survival that will have long term implications for the functioning of the system as a whole and the opportunities that are available to students. To give one example: colleges report that what they see as predatory behaviour by universities to try to scoop up the students that might more traditionally be seen in college-based higher education provision is placing that provision under significant strain.
Choices for change
Dealing with the immediate pressures on costs while also staring down the barrel of a call for reform is objectively a very difficult psychological space for higher education to be in. Everyone I speak to is desperate for more time in their day to reflect, digest, make sense, and plan. Something I often find useful when I find the world confusing (an alarmingly frequent occurrence) is some kind of model or map to help me structure my thoughts, especially when time is limited.
I like putting one thing next to another thing and seeing what happens, and so for this case I put change actors on one continuum from individual institutions to multiple organisations in collaboration, and scale of change on the other, from evolution to revolution. I then tried to think of all the “change” activities that are either under way or are being mooted and assigned them to quadrants.
I’ve taken a few things from this exercise.
One is that I think it hugely unlikely that the sector will coalesce into one of the quadrants or even at the top or bottom of the model. I think we will see activity in all four quadrants depending on the context – and I think that policy should seek to support all four forms of change to give the sector the best chance of making a good fist of it. I have found arriving at this conclusion oddly freeing, as it stops the circular argument of advocating any single activity such as income diversification, or merger, or shared services, as a unified answer to the sector’s challenges. It is possible to argue, as we have at Wonkhe, that the policy environment could be more conducive to supporting radical forms of collaboration, without suggesting that all institutions must now hasten to adopt these forms if these do not serve wider missions and objectives. Likewise, it does not necessarily follow that introducing mechanisms to support collaboration would reduce competitive pressures in some parts of the sector or geographies, and the sector may collectively need to make its peace with that.
Another is that it’s noticeable that the activity to the left in the “evolution” space is a much more “comfortable” space for higher education, in the sense that it’s possible to see it already in action and the sector knows how to do it, not that all the activities listed are necessarily things that are desirable in every case. There’s a question, then, about whether, IF substantial change is needed, it’s possible for the accumulation of practices in the evolution space to achieve it – or do we just end up with lots of random examples of interesting practice and not much that is fundamentally different. I instinctively think that policy should accept that the grain of sector practice runs in the direction of evolution rather than transformation, and seek to work with the sector on mapping critical paths towards the change that is desired rather than administering exogenous shocks to the system.
Finally, I’d like to see what new ideas the sector could come up with in the right hand side of the diagram (especially the top right quadrant) – not necessarily to advocate for, but to help open up the conversation and ask meaningful questions of current practice. It’s quite easy to explain why all the ideas in the top right quadrant are unlikely to happen, so another way to come at that question is to ask whether there are other ideas that might be more plausible.
Tone matters here though – for some that idea of transformation is something like a playground, where it’s fun to speculate about different possibilities and might spark some useful thinking. For others, it could carry a much more serious weight of strategic challenge and need to be approached accordingly as likely to have a material impact on people’s lives and working conditions. The stakes are much higher on this side of the evolution to transformation continuum, particularly where an institution is operating in the bottom right quadrant – the risks of failure are real.
