06May

This project on ‘The Futures of Higher Education’ aims to stimulate creative and imaginative thinking and ideas about the future of higher education up to 2050. The project takes a global perspective, feeding discussions around the role of higher education into UNESCO’s wider Futures of Education initiative. 

Recent years have been marked by developments such as the growth of private providers and the privatisation of publicly funded higher education, evolving accreditation systems, increased access and changes in the way higher education is funded. External challenges and opportunities for higher education systems include demographic and political change, economic crises, war and conflict and, as we have seen recently, the global pandemic. These factors affect all aspects of higher education provision, the environment in which higher education operates, what it will need to deliver in the future, and how it will be structured and funded.      

The project will be guided, on the one hand, by how higher education has been shaped to date, re-examining what, in the recent past, has already been proposed as a desirable or plausible future for higher education. On the other hand, we seek to find ways of removing the constraints of departure from the past and present in our vision of the future. This is particularly important about notions of higher education which have predominated in the past, but which do not reflect the plurality of existing knowledge traditions.  

The project will innovatively generate new perspectives on the future of higher education based on open and expert consultations, youth focus groups and a multilingual literature review. The two guiding questions of the project are: What do you want higher education to look like in 2050? How could higher education contribute to a better future for all in 2050?