Transcript Publiczne uniwersytety przedsiębiorcze w dobie konkurencji

Keynote Speech:
The Growing Complexity of the Academic
Enterprise: Challenges Ahead
Polish EU Presidency Conference on
the Modernisation of European Higher Education,
Sopot, 23-25 October, 2011
Professor Marek Kwiek,
Director, Center for Public
Policy Studies,
Poznan University, Poland
[email protected]
Introduction – Pressures (2)
• Several interrelated factors:
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globalization and Europeanization,
educational expansion and massification of HE,
the economic crisis and public sector reforms, and
knowledge-driven economic competitiveness of
nations and regions.
• External pressures exerted on higher education:
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economic (financial) pressures
political (ideological) pressures
social pressures
demographic pressures.
Introduction – contentious areas
(3)
The most contentious areas include the following:
• University funding in mass HE systems.
– Question: Who pays? Who should pay?
• Increasing role of cost-sharing (fees and loans).
– Question: What is the future of tax-based systems?
• Increasing role of third-stream funding.
– Question: What is the current and future role of noncore, non-state income, both teaching-related and
research-related?
• Changing university governance modes.
– Question: Is more managerialism and less collegiality
expected?
Introduction – contentious areas
(4)
• Increasing delinking of teaching/research/third mission
activities.
– Question: Is the traditional link strong, and how systems can be
internally differentiated by levels of research intensivity?
• Changing academic profession.
– Question: How far can differentiation processes within the
profession go, following differentiation processes in higher
education systems?
• Further expansion of higher education systems.
– Question: What universal higher education may mean for
graduates, their job prospects and future trends in wage
premium from higher education?
• Higher education as a public/private good.
– Question: What are the implications of viewing higher education
as an increasingly private good?
Introduction – 3 questions (5)
• Should European HE systems expect more
market mechanisms in their functioning and
expect new income-generating patterns?
• What is the role of new stakeholders in higher
education and how the teaching/research
missions may evolve?
• To what extent meeting conflicting demands
from different stakeholders is a major challenge
to the European academic profession.
Market mechanisms and new
income-generating patterns (6)
• European HEIs in the next decade may be
responding to increasingly unfriendly
financial settings by either cost-side
solutions or revenue-side solutions.
• A more probable response to possibly
worsening financial settings is basically by
revenue-side solutions: seeking new
sources of income, largely non-state, noncore, and non-traditional to most European
systems.
Market mechanisms and new
income-generating patterns (7)
• While the cost containment may be the state
response to financial austerity, seeking new
revenues may increasingly be an institutional
response to the financial crisis on the part of
HEIs.
• The introduction of fees or their higher levels will
be in the spotlight in those systems in which
universities will be seeking additional non-state
funding.
• The postwar (Continental) European tradition
was tax-based higher education, and (high-level)
fees still look non-traditional in most systems.
Market mechanisms and new
income-generating patterns (8)
The University is no longer a quiet place
to teach and do scholarly work at a
measured pace and contemplate the
universe as in centuries past. It is a big,
complex, demanding, competitive
business requiring large-scale ongoing
investment (Malcolm Skilbeck).
Market mechanisms and new
income-generating patterns (9)
• Market forces in HE: on the rise worldwide
and non-core non-state income of
universities: on the rise too.
• The form and pace of these
transformations are different across the
world, changes are of a global nature and
are expected to have a powerful impact on
HE systems in Europe.
New stakeholders, teaching &
research (10)
• Altered relationships between various HE
stakeholders: the decreasing role of the
state (e.g. in terms of funding), the
increasing role of students and the labor
market (for the more teaching-oriented
sector of HE), and the increasing role of
the industry and the regions (for the more
research-oriented sector of HE).
New stakeholders, teaching &
research (11)
• Increasingly differentiated student needs –
resulting from differentiated student populations
in massified systems – already lead to largely
differentiated systems of institutions.
• The expected differentiation-related
developments in the next decade may alter the
academic profession in general, further increase
its heterogeneity, and have a strong impact on
the traditional relationships between teaching
and research.
New stakeholders, teaching &
research (12)
• The social, political, and economic contexts in
which universities function are changing, and so
are changing student populations and
educational institutions.
• HE is subject to powerful influences from all
sides and all – new and old alike – stakeholders:
the state, the students, the faculty, employers,
and the industry,
• On top of that, HE s becoming a very costly
business (“more income is always needed:
universities are expensive, and good universities
are very expensive”, Burton Clark, 1998).
New stakeholders, teaching &
research (13)
• The complexity of the academic enterprise
in the next decade is that different
stakeholders may increasingly have
different needs from those they
traditionally had.
• HE institutions are thus expected to
transform themselves to maintain public
trust (and to have good rationale to use
public subsidies).
New stakeholders, teaching &
research (14)
• HEIs are under pressures to compete for financial
resources with other public services, also heavily
reliant on the public purse.
• Public priorities are changing throughout the world,
and new funding patterns and funding mechanisms
can be experimented with.
• The trend of disconnecting teaching and research in
HE, OECD datasets: “academic research might just
become concentrated in a relatively small share of
the system while the largest number of institutions
will carry out little research, if any” (Stephan
Vincent-Lancrin 2006).
Conflicting demands on the
academic profession (15)
• European universities will be attractive if they
are able to meet current (sometimes conflicting)
differentiated needs.
• These needs sometimes seem to run counter to
the traditional twentieth-century social
expectations of the academic profession in
continental Europe.
• Attractive European HE systems will have to find
a fair balance in expected transformations so
that the academic profession is not deprived of
its traditional voice.
Conflicting demands on the
academic profession (16)
• Differentiated student populations in Europe
require increasingly differentiated institutions,
and (possibly) different types of academics.
• This might mean the decline of the high social
prestige of higher education graduates (in
millions) and of the high social prestige of most
academics (in hundreds of thousands in major
European economies). The universalization of
higher education is already having profound
impact on the social stratification of academics.
Conflicting demands on the
academic profession (17)
• The point is that the academic profession is at the
core of the academic enterprise.
• Universities are linking the world of learning and the
world of work (Teichler 2008), as well as linking
research and innovation.
• But universities may become useless in the
knowledge-driven economy if the academic
profession is not fully involved in debates about their
future and if the academic profession is not
optimistic about its future.
• This is what the logics of the political economy of
reforms suggests.
The changing academic
profession – a snapshot (18)
The changing academic
profession – a snapshot (19)
The changing academic
profession – a snapshot (20)
Snapshots – summary (21)
• The growing complexity of the academic
enterprise may put the optimism still prevailing in
most European systems at risk. And optimism
will be needed in the midst of ongoing and
envisaged reforms.
• In ever more complicated settings,
overburdened, overworked, and frustrated
academics would not be able to make European
universities attractive. Then the complexity
would be even more complex than assumed
here.
Snaphots – summary (22)
• Emergent complexities, expected for the
coming decade, directly or indirectly, refer
to the academic profession.
• Both academics and academic institutions
are highly adaptable to external
circumstances (with the necessary
balance of change and stability always at
play).
Conclusions (23)
• First, the scope of changes expected for all
major aspects of HE operations is much bigger
than commonly believed. The changes
envisaged by policymakers are structural,
fundamental and go to the very heart of the
academic enterprise.
• Second, the growing complexity of the acadmeic
enterprise is related to:
– biggest public investments in history;
– highest numbers of students and academics in
history;
– high relevance to economic growth and job creation in
knowledge-driven economies; and
– increasing expectations from society and
policymakers.
Conclusions (24)
• Third, no one-size fits all type of answers
to the dilemmas but (due to globalization,
Europeanization and internationalization)
idiosyncratic, specifically national answers
to them are ever more problematic in the
increasingly interconnected world.
• Thank you very much for your attention.