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Higher education was originally built to serve a small elite, but today it faces pressure from surging demand, inequities in access, shifting workforce needs, and urgent social challenges. This segment unpacks the four areas where redesign is critical — expanding global capacity, ensuring inclusion and equity, preparing learners for lifelong careers in uncertain job markets, and strengthening universities’ role in tackling community issues from climate to public health.
So let's just think about design. Everything that is not in the natural world was designed by somebody at some point, intentionally or unintentionally. Designs are always, you know, they emerge out of a need in the context, the resources that are available, a problem that people are trying to solve for and designs work until they don't. And things are changing around them and circumstances are changing.
The context is different, and sometimes designs don't evolve with the changes around them. So that applies to institutions like higher education as well. It's a very old institution. They've been around for a very long time, and they were historically designed to serve the needs of a very small subset of elites in society. Then, over a period of time, they expanded in scope.
There are a lot of different models of higher education around the world. And yet, if you look globally, institutions of higher education are fundamentally the same. There was a teaching mission for those that do research. There is a research mission. The fundamental model has not evolved as quickly as society around us has evolved. So when we think about the design of higher education, the question is, are universities as relevant and as impactful as they need to be for the world in which we live?
We can then break it down into why do we need changes? Why do we need new designs? So there are four categories into which I would put that response. First one is the capacity of the higher education system globally. The second category is access and inclusion. Who can actually get into universities. The third category is workforce and career development.
Who are we training? What are we training them to do? Are they meeting the needs of society? And then the fourth category is sustaining community impact. So if we look at capacity in the higher education system globally, there are about 250 million people enrolled in higher ed. The projections are that by 2030, we will have 120 million additional learners.
That requires a 48% increase in the system. That's the equivalent of building like 20 to 100 new universities a year. Assuming that those universities also have about 10,000 students, that's not going to happen. So we need new designs. We need new models to accommodate the need that we already know exists. Now the need is not even around the world.
Some parts of the world that need is higher, but nevertheless higher education as a system needs to design or redesign for capacity. But even where there is capacity, access and inclusion are important questions. So if you look at some of the data, it suggests that there's a 65% gap in enrollment between those from the top income levels of society and those at the bottom.
So even in places where there is capacity, the question is who has access to higher education? Are we really talking about an equitable system in this day and age, where some groups of humans simply don't see a path into higher education? Now, it doesn't just have to be income. It could be your community. It could be your rich where you live.
You're so far away. It could be from the socio economic status you come from, where you really don't have the luxury of spending three and four years at higher education institutions. You have to work for a living. Or we are also seeing places where people who are disabled don't have access, and they don't see a sense of belonging.
So we can slice it in many ways. But access and inclusion to higher education, we are far from optimizing that across all of our societies. So that is an area where we need to really think about design. The third space is career and workforce development. When we engage around the world, policymakers, industry leaders and higher education leaders all stressed about the fact that society needs a lot of talented people and they are not getting out there fast enough.
Some projections suggest that there will be about 85 mil. There will be a global deficit of about 85 million jobs over the next couple of years. Some 80 million plus jobs are going to go away with technology and AI. Now universities are not solely responsible for addressing those issues, but as institutions that generate educated humans and provide for the workforce that requires us to step back and say, we have to design ourselves and reorganize ourselves to meet the needs of our societies.
The other part of that workforce and career development is it's not enough just to produce people who can get jobs upon graduation. We're also living in an era where people don't just do one thing for a living. We are in an era where we can't even quite predict what jobs will be like ten and 15 years from now.
So how are we preparing learners not just for that first job or that second job, but for thriving careers and to be contributing members of society. And then there is a “Who is being addressed in this career and workforce development space?” Historically, universities focus on students, high school graduates who came in, they got a degree and they left.
The needs of our societies are very different right now. Yes, we do need individuals who have to be equipped with degrees. But what about all those people who already have degrees and who want to upskill? What about those that may not need a degree in the moment, but still need some [up]skilling? So the career and workforce development pieces again require tremendous design or redesign, and then the fourth place is this notion of universities having [a] sustaining impact on their communities.
So much is changing in the world around us are not always for the good. Our climate change is impacting our societies and our communities in significant ways. Environmental ecological issues. Then there are issues of health, access to clean water, agriculture, food security, social and cultural needs of our communities. And what is the role of universities in all of this?
As institutions that produce the leaders of society, that produce the workforce of society, that produce knowledge, that should be solving social problems. What are we doing here? I think there is room for design. So if the question is why is design important to higher education? It is for these reasons [that] there has to be more capacity in the system?
We need new designs for that. There has to be ways to make access and inclusion and create more equity in who gets into higher ed. We need to design for that. We need design to reimagine contributing to the workforce and putting people on trajectories for lifelong success. We need to rethink that. And then for self-sustaining community impact. So all of this points to the fact that universities, as they're currently designed, are definitely making contributions and having impact, but not quite at the pace at which society requires us to do so.