A 2040 vision of HE dominated by grand knowledge hubs

Indian and Chinese universities will expand one-hundred-fold and the future will be dominated by 'grand knowledge hubs' with four in Asia, two in North America, one in the UK and maybe others in Sweden/Denmark, Germany/Switzerland, Belgium/Netherlands and France.

These are among the predictions of the trends in global higher education in 2040 made by of Bert Van der Zwaan, rector magnificus of Utrecht University since 2011 and chairman of the League of European Research Universities, in his new book, published on 20 March, entitled Higher Education in 2040: A global approach (Amsterdam University Press).

Throughout the book Van der Zwaan, a professor of paleontology, wrestles with changes over the next 20-25 years in higher education: changes in the demand for higher education – notably in Asia – “where China and India are facing the mammoth task of expanding their number of universities and colleges of professional education by what may be a factor of 100, to meet the demand”.

He suggests a growth of dominance by ‘grand knowledge hubs’ with great concentrations of universities, research institutions, top-level scholars and advanced research infrastructures in a dynamic interface.

And he foresees that in the next two decades there will be radical changes in the curriculum and degree structure, how these will be taught, how teaching will be related to research – and growing interdisciplinary research and teaching.

He predicts that research publication will change from “overproduction” of semi-good articles today, often not read, and produced at an extremely high cost, to more use of open access, and publication of preliminary research results with an increased use of large databases and methods.

Van der Zwaan’s greatest nightmare is the increasing decoupling of universities from the state with a consequential increasing need to find funding elsewhere and the blocking of higher education for talented youth due to high tuition costs.

He takes a comparative approach, looking at what has happened over the past 25 years within higher education worldwide, with special reference to a comparison between Europe, North America and Asia. He gathers several good examples of what we could have expected to happen when the Berlin Wall was taken down, for example, leading to an easing up of the Cold War and leading to greater collaboration between Eastern Europe and the Western world.

But few could have foreseen that at a later stage this would lead to the growing nationalistic trends of today, exemplified by the vote for Brexit in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump as president in the United States.

That this will have an effect upon the international collaboration and student exchanges between nations in the coming decades is obvious, but Van der Zwaan argues that it is not easy to see today what this impact will be.

Size and regional dominance

One fascinating part of Van der Zwaan’s analysis is his thinking on how size and regional dominance will lead to the further development of grand ’knowledge hubs’.

He argues for two such hubs in North America, one in California and one in the Boston area. He thinks that the London area most probably will keep the status as a knowledge hub, but it is an open question whether the Lund/ Copenhagen area, the southern Germany-Zurich area, the Randstad region in Belgium and the Netherlands and Paris will manage to push on to become worldwide technological innovation hubs.

In Asia, Van der Zwaan predicts there will be four knowledge hubs in 25 years´ time: Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong/Shenzhen and Singapore.

An earlier Dutch-language version published in the Netherlands in January, with the subtitle “opportunities and threats”, led to a fierce public debate about the preferable future of Dutch universities.

Commenting on Van der Zwaan’s predictions, Professor Robert Coelen, professor of internationalisation of Stenden University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, told University World News: “The smart universities realise that, as government will come under a financial squeeze (paying for health care, old age care, etc) and start to look to present more of the cost of education to the user, they'll need to be ready to provide more service to these users, who will gain little direct effect from high-powered research. They will demand excellent education for their money.

“In his conclusions, Van der Zwaan thinks that universities (read research-intensive universities) need to think about the bachelor degree programme as delivering more work-ready graduates, maybe by changing their three-year programmes into four-year ones. Guess what? Universities of applied sciences have been doing this for a long time with their four-year bachelor degree programmes.”

Coelen argues that Van der Zwaan could have gone further on the need to develop a strong emphasis on soft or transversal skills in earlier phases of education. He said employer surveys over the past decade show the need for such skills as a prime requirement for employability.

“Personally, I think education to develop good transversal skills needs to start in primary school and be continued at secondary level. By the time we have done that, the student of the future can use tertiary education to get much further than they do today.

“And I think we are going to need this, as the global challenges need solutions created by people who have enjoyed an education that is different from current offerings. For example, I think future students need to be adept at creating collaborating teams to use information that is readily available at the outset of their university education and not at the end,” Coelen said.

Western decline

Jouke de Vries, professor of governance and public policy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, said Van der Zwaan’s analysis is partially right and strong in its comparative perspective.

He told University World News: “The Western world is in decline, and universities in Asia are growing very fast. Universities in Western Europe are still related to the national state. More students, less financial means is the trend.”

He said: “We solve the problem by believing in the digitisation of education and in hubs. Hubs are related to regions in which public organisations, private companies and universities are working together. It is a solution for natural science and engineering.”

But, he said, “hubs are more difficult to organise for humanities and social science.”

“In the Netherlands the national state is becoming less important, and regions are becoming more important: de Randstad, Eindhoven and the region in the North,” de Vries said. Also, digitisation “makes branch universities more possible”.

David Hoffman, senior researcher at the Finnish Institute for Educational Research, said he welcomed Van der Zwaan’s book for “introducing a set of questions that not so many of us will actually encounter in communications from international agencies, ministries or especially the management of our own universities”.

He said he has been continually amazed in all the time he has been thinking about and studying comparative and international higher education that “seriously thinking about clear alternative possibilities” for the long term, as he says Van der Zwaan is doing in this case, is “not the norm”.

“Under neoliberal ideology, it is precisely the opposite.”