Different interpretations of the ‘knowledge society’ give different emphasis to the role of higher education institutions. In some interpretations, higher education's ‘time has come’, with a new centrality for universities and other higher education institutions in meeting the economic and other requirements of a new kind of society. In other interpretations, higher education's ‘time has passed’, its central functions increasingly shared and its boundaries with other social institutions increasingly porous. Thus, higher education institutions are either pivotal within the knowledge society or they are just one amongst many knowledge organisations. What can be agreed, however, is that many features of higher education institutions have been changing quite radically in recent decades and that these changes are inextricably linked to changes that have been taking place in the wider society. Moreover, more changes can be anticipated.
A number of trends can be discerned in the recent history of higher education systems and institutions in most developed countries. The first is expansion – through the stages of ‘elite’, to ‘mass’ to ‘universal’ assigned by TrowReference Trow1 – linked to a second trend, which is differentiation – taking both ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ formsReference Teichler2 – and both linked to a larger ‘globalisation’ process through which the key higher education activities of research and teaching increasingly transcend the boundaries of individual nation states. Within the central activities of research and teaching can be discerned changing organisational and cultural boundaries (e.g. the growth of interdisciplinary teaching and ‘mode 2’ research formsReference Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, Schwartzman, Scott and Trow3), both within higher education institutions and between these institutions and other institutions of the knowledge society. Linked to these changes are changes to the arrangements for the governance and management of universities with new forms of ‘managerialism’ and ‘enterpreneurship’ challenging traditional patterns of academic authority and autonomy.Reference Slaughter and Leslie4, Reference Deem, Hillgard and Reed5 However, alongside these apparently global trends can be found different national traditions and different institutional histories, which continue to exercise considerable influence over how higher education responds to wider developments in the ‘knowledge society’.
Trow's classic account of the expansion of higher education assigns quite different functions to its elite, mass and universal forms. Thus, in terms of the functions of higher education, the elite forms involve ‘shaping the mind and character of the ruling class’, the mass forms are about ‘transmission of skills, preparation for a broader range of technical elite roles’ and universal higher education is about the ‘adaptation of the “whole population” to rapid social and technological change’ (Brennan, quoted in Ref. Reference Trow6). It is important to remember that Trow saw the elite, mass and universal forms as both stages in the expansion of higher education and as parallel segments of it within expanded systems. Thus, universal systems of higher education would generally comprise elite and mass as well as universal institutions. It is also worth remembering that Trow did not define universal as ‘higher education for everyone’ but as a system with more than 50% of a nation's population participating at some stage in the life course. Mass higher education involved between 16% and 50%. On this basis, most contemporary higher education systems would be in their advanced stages of the mass form, with universal access in sight or at least present as a policy goal.
Teichler's two forms of system differentiation map onto the Trow typology quite well. They illustrate the different ways in which mass systems can accommodate multiple functions. Vertical differentiation places the emphasis on a reputational hierarchy of institutions and is likely to be associated with a strong elite reproduction function of higher education. Horizontal differentiation is more likely to be associated with functional differences – ‘professional’ versus ‘academic’ courses, ‘pure’ versus ‘applied’ research – often embodied in distinct higher education sectors and generally reflecting a closer linkage with the perceived needs of national (and global) labour markets. In considering the different ways in which modern higher education systems are differentiated, it is important to recognise the increasing role played by institutions that are not called universities. And this in itself may be a reflection of the more porous boundary conditions referred to above, where a distinctiveness of something called ‘higher’ education becomes increasingly blurred in relation to other forms of post-school education, variously termed adult, further, professional or lifelong education.
The increasing diversity and differentiation of modern higher education systems is sometimes not fully reflected in the academic literature on the subject, which can be somewhat biased by the backgrounds and affiliations of the authors, frequently located in the more elite parts of these systems. Thus, while accounts of higher education's functions with regards processes of ‘elite reproduction’ and the creation of a ‘state nobility’Reference Bourdieu7 are convincing and continue to be applicable in many societies, they are not the ‘whole story’ of the role of higher education in contemporary developed societies.
Within this larger picture of expanded and differentiated higher education systems, a number of further trends and developments – as well as questions – can be identified.
Goals and Perspectives
In a world where increasing volumes of knowledge production and transmission are taking place beyond the gates of higher education institutions, and higher education's claims to ‘monopoly’ over these processes are increasingly difficult to make, the core role of higher education institutions may come to rest more on the accreditation and certification of knowledge rather than on its production or transmission. Of course, a more radical conclusion might be that separate institutions of higher education are no longer needed at all in societies where the core functions of these institutions are diffused so widely. On the other hand, and as noted above, attention must also be given to some of the other functions commonly ascribed to higher education, including a possibly key one of social reproduction and legitimisationReference Bourdieu7, Reference Bourdieu8 through the differential assignment of ‘qualifications’ to members of different social groups. And conversely, higher education as an avenue to social mobility remains another function claimed for its institutions in most contemporary societies.
In practice, multiple futures for universities seem most plausible and reflect the increasing differentiation of higher education systems. Whatever form it takes, differentiation can allow simultaneously for higher education to play roles in both the reproduction and the transformation of societies. Some forms of higher education may have as their focus quite regional and local agendas to do with upskilling of local workforces and carrying out research and knowledge transfer functions, responding directly to local needs and interest groups. Other forms may have more global ambitions and pretentions and make greater claims for independence and autonomy in the conduct of their work. The university as both critic and engineer of social change is at the heart of such a conception, ‘taking truth to power’ as it is sometimes described, but itself tending to be located within the power structures and elite groupings of the societies of which the university is a part.
In whatever form or part of a differentiated higher education system one finds oneself, one will also find boundaries of different strengths and directions: boundaries between what counts as recognised knowledge; boundaries between knowledge transmitters and receivers (not quite reducible to a distinction between teachers and learners); boundaries reflecting social class and other aspects of broader social differentiation; and boundaries between different knowledge segments (previously known as subjects), institutional settings both within and beyond the higher education world.
The goals and perspectives of different institutional actors in these different institutional settings reflect these wider differences across modern higher education systems. In part, they reflect the elite, mass and universal distinctions referred to above, although these distinctions themselves have a different salience in different settings and circumstances. What can also be said with some confidence is that one generally finds an economic rationale foregrounded in both public and private individual investment decisions on higher education, reflecting the needs of governments for successful economies, of businesses for increasing market share, and of individuals for good salaries and comfortable lifestyles. However, not far off stage can be heard sceptical voices who question whether societies really need ‘all these graduates’ and whether the jobs are available for them to utilise their skills and talents.
Notions of ‘Excellence’
The concept of ‘excellence’ is of course pivotal to the claims that ‘higher’ education is in some ways different and superior to other forms of education. In expanded systems, excellence claims become increasingly important to support reputational differentiation. And the identification of an elite group of ‘world class’ universities has become an explicit policy goal within many countries. The German ‘Exzellenzinitiative’ would be one example of this trend. We would broadly follow Calhoun's claim that excellence has become a concept to be defined in terms of being ‘better than’ somebody or something else.Reference Calhoun9 The argument is used to allow preferential treatments to be accorded to the ‘best graduates’ from ‘top universities’, to justify the increasingly selective funding of research and of higher education generally, and to explain the growing attention accorded to international rankings of higher education institutions and the comparative performance of different national higher education systems. (Although, as an influential British commentator noted at a recent conference, there may be choices to be made between having a ‘few excellent universities’ and having an ‘excellent higher education system’ – Lord Browne of Madingley, speaking at a Royal Society conference in London on 19 May 2010, has reviewed the funding of higher education for the British government.) There are, though, counter claims to be made that excellence has many facets and that we can all strive for excellence, but in different things and in different ways. The different approaches to excellence reflect larger tensions between the need for diversity against the trend towards hierarchy and status differentiation.
In practical terms, we have seen the rise of league tables and rankings of higher education institutions both within and across national boundaries. Excellence is thus seen as being the preserve of an elite, although the basis of elitism may differ in terms of the importance assigned to social or educational factors. Thus, discussions of excellence cannot be separated from discussions of meritocracy. Do members of elite groups ‘deserve’ their places in these advantaged groups because of their talents and achievements or do they reflect the inequalities of wealth and other forms of social and cultural capital? Modern Western societies at least tend to emphasise the former as the ideal, although, at best, one that is only imperfectly achieved. And universities thus acquire a legitimising role in respect of social inequality by assigning its causes to differential talent and achievement and providing routes to social mobility for the talented and ‘deserving’.
Governance
On the subject of governance, it is widely noted that higher education's traditions of autonomy are increasingly challenged by societal demands for greater responsiveness. From this perspective, higher education has become ‘too important’ to be left in the hands of academics. The counter argument, of course, is that a substantial measure of autonomy and independence is essential to the performance of higher education's central tasks. Nevertheless, the general view would surely be that the trend to greater responsiveness is ‘winning’ and is accompanied by linked processes of greater managerialism and accountability and by the arrival of entrepreneurialism and ‘academic capitalism’Reference Slaughter and Leslie4 within the academy.
That said, the different starting points of individual higher education institutions, and especially the national systems of which they are a part, must be recognised.Reference Garcia-Aracil and Palomares-Montero10 In many European systems, tradition has located power and governance in the hands of national ministries and individual professors with very little authority located at the institutional level. Whereas, in Anglo-Saxon systems, the institutional level of governance has been much more important. Burton Clark's well-known ‘triangle of co-ordination’Reference Clark11 captures the distinctions rather differently with the ‘academic oligarchy’, the state and the market as the main sources of power and authority. The higher education systems of different nation states move their position within Clark's triangle over time as national governance arrangements change. But if global trends of convergence are to be detected, they are probably to be found in the growing importance of governments and markets and the declining importance of academics and individual universities. However, the mechanisms through which governance issues are discharged also evolve, with evaluation and quality assurance systems replacing top-down controls and regulation in many places. Funding formulae and markets (real or rhetorical) are also invested with considerable influence over the development of individual higher education institutions.
There are two other trends that can be related to changes in governance arrangements. The first is the increasing importance of partnerships – both between individual universities and between them and other organisations – to the operation of modern higher education systems. Partnerships may be concerned with cooperation in professional training between employers and higher education institutions, or with collaboration between researchers based in universities and researchers based in companies, or between higher education and a whole range of ‘civic organisations’ concerned with the achievement of social cohesion, community renewal or other ‘social order’ functions within the knowledge society. What all these forms of partnership can entail is an increasing sharing of governance and management processes in higher education with organisations of quite a wide range of different types outside the walls of higher education.
The other trend, and one enhanced by the growing number of higher education partnerships with other organisations, is a greater mobility in the academic profession in terms of people crossing and re-crossing the boundaries between higher education and other organisations. In some countries, there is a growing incidence of senior managers of universities being appointed from outside higher education. In some cases, institutional leaders are appointed with no previous experience of working in higher education. Thus, it is sometimes claimed that universities are becoming ‘businesses’ like any other. The claims made in previous decades for the university's ‘exceptionalism’ as a form of organisationReference Clark11, Reference Becher and Kogan12 may no longer be as valid as they once were.
Pedagogy and the Student Experience
On the subject of pedagogy and, more generally, the student experience within higher education, strong trends towards greater consumerism have been notedReference Naidoo13 involving emphasis on informed student choice, and on evaluation mechanisms and rankings to inform such choice. These trends bring with them questions about comparability of quality and standards in the different parts of increasingly differentiated higher education systems. It has been notedReference Brennan and Singh14 that evaluation systems that originally had as their objective the achievement of comparability of quality and standards have today the opposite concern of demonstrating differences and justifying hierarchy between the programmes and qualifications offered by different higher education institutions.
At the more micro levels of pedagogy, new forms of information technology are in some places transforming not only the processes of knowledge acquisition but also the relationships between teachers and learners and between learners themselves. Alongside changes in pedagogy can be found changes in curricula (with more interdisciplinarity, more concerns with employability factors) and in the circumstances of study (with more part-time courses and more likelihood of it being undertaken at different stages in the life course).
It is probably in the area of pedagogy that some of the larger questions about the future form and role of universities are currently being asked. New forms of technology provide many new forms of access to knowledge, and these challenge, or even replace, traditional relationships between teachers and students. In one of his last writings, Martin Trow saw the tensions that lay in the transformative potential of new forms of communication technology. He wrote
Yet it seems likely that in the near future much of what is done today by people working in physical proximity may be possible to approximate through electronic links among people who are physically separated. (Ref. Reference Trow6, p. 609)
But importantly he also observes that
The wish of people to be in each other's presence, and the spontaneity of interaction and relationship that allows, cannot be duplicated through technology, or at least any that we are likely to see in place in the next quarter century. (Ref. Reference Trow6, p. 610)
It is worth noting that some recent studies of students and graduatesReference Brennan, Edmunds, Houston, Jary, Lebeau, Osborne and Richardson15 have reported on the considerable importance assigned by students to the relationships and friendships formed within higher education as constituting key benefits gained from the experience of attending university or other higher education institution.
While there may well be limitations to what can be achieved through the exploitation of new technologies, it cannot be assumed that Trow's ‘duplication’ and continuity will be achieved as higher education systems and institutions continue to evolve in response to both global and more localised social, economic and technological changes. It may well be that higher education's functions will increasingly be limited to the acquisition of skills and qualifications required by the labour market and that broader socialisation functions previously associated with a university education will take place elsewhere or not at all.
Diversity of Forms and Functions
As has already been noted, the expansion of higher education systems and institutions has been accompanied by a substantial differentiation of their functions and organisational forms. Trow referred to elite, mass and universal systems and Teichler drew our attention to both vertical and horizontal forms of their differentiation. Yet, notwithstanding the pressures of globalisation, it remains clear that there remain considerable differences between the higher education systems and institutions of different nations. They differ in relation to the distribution of the university's key functions of teaching and research and the development of newer ones of knowledge transfer and innovation. They differ in the ways the elite, mass and universal functions are distributed across diversified institutions and systems. And they differ in terms of the ways that differentiated higher education maps on to differentiated societies. While much of the policy rhetoric of higher education concerns economic priorities, much of what is being delivered by higher education systems concerns social equity or the lack of it.Reference Brennan and Naidoo16
Conclusions
Will future knowledge societies continue to need separate institutions of ‘higher’ education? How far will the notion of an education that is ‘higher’ than other forms continue to be viable within differentiated knowledge organisations of the knowledge society? And if separate institutions called universities continue to exist, what resemblance will they have to their present forms?
The longevity of recognisable forms of university institutions has often been remarked upon. Thus, apocalyptic answers to the above questions should probably be viewed with some caution. Yet it is equally clear that changes are happening and that more are coming. More and different sections of society are involved. For those who study in them, participation is occurring at different stages in the life course. Participation may increasingly be ‘off campus’ and involve little direct contact with people who are called teachers. Functions of research and teaching may become increasingly disassociated from each other as well as becoming increasingly differentiated, for example between pure and applied in the case of research and between professional and academic in the case of education. And newer functions of knowledge transfer and innovation may need to be assigned greater importance. But as indicated earlier, it may be higher education's role in the validation and accreditation of knowledge that will become increasingly important and defining in its role in society. As access to knowledge increases, questions of ‘what counts’ as knowledge become ever more important. The future of higher education institutions may well lie in providing answers to these questions.
John Brennan is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Research at the UK Open University, where he was also the Director of the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information for nearly 20 years. He has directed many national and international research projects on the changing relationship between higher education and other parts of society. His publications include books on graduate employment, student learning and quality assurance.
