HE must address societal challenges or lose relevance

More than 2,000 leaders and innovators in education from across the world gathered at the annual WISE Summit in Qatar last week. They were asked in an online poll before the event began whether they thought a university degree was essential for economic progression in the 21st century. More than 60% answered no.

This was a group deeply committed to what one of the speakers, Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco Partners and founder of the Ralston-Semler Foundation in Brazil, described as “the transformational power of education” and especially its ability to change the lives of marginalised groups.

This year’s recipient of the annual WISE Prize was Dr Sakena Yacoobi. She had almost single-handedly transformed the lives of thousands of women in the most difficult circumstances in Afghanistan through education. Why then do so many of these pioneers and innovators show such scepticism where access to higher education is concerned?

A first reason may be the difficulties higher education faces, especially in a region like the Middle East, in defining what it is for in the 21st century. The panel session at the summit titled “The future of higher education” featured, among others, former tertiary education co-ordinator at the World Bank, Dr Jamil Salmi, and the renowned American journalist Jeffrey Selingo.

While all the panellists made valuable contributions, there was little consensus on how to balance the desire for higher education to prepare citizens to face and solve the global challenges in the early 21st century versus the need to enable students to be employable.

Graduate unemployment is far too high, especially in the Middle East. This is causing real damage to access and equity arguments. The citizenship argument commands great sympathy but it wasn’t clear how to combine it with mechanisms to bring these levels of unemployment down.

The summit focused predominantly on inequities in primary and secondary education. Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser stated in the opening plenary that 60 million children across the world will not complete primary school and this number is growing with the present refugee crisis.

Inevitably, in the face of this challenge, access to higher education looks like a second order consideration. But unless pathways to higher education are expanded and constructed, a ceiling is being placed on the impact of participation in primary/secondary education on the lives of children in the developing world.

This argument was missing from the debate on primary/secondary schooling and inequities and the solutions. The 2015 WISE Education Survey, conducted among 1,550 education experts from across the world in the month preceding the summit, called for collaborative solutions to the “failure of education to keep pace with changing workplaces”. However, the collaboration suggested involved schools and workplaces but, tellingly, not universities.

Finally, perhaps the most important message coming from the summit was the need to address the impact of conflict. We are experiencing at present the highest sense of forced displacement since the Second World War, with over 60 million people displaced from their homes. Of these, half are young people and only 1% are going on to higher education. Action is underway to engage higher education on this issue.

Rapid response

Jorge Sampaio, the former president of the Portuguese Republic, spoke of the new initiative he is leading to set up a rapid response mechanism for higher education to support humanitarian emergencies. The aim is to avoid creating a ‘lost generation’ of students who are unable to access higher education as they suffer from the consequences of conflict.

The ability of higher education participation to be central to the global education policy and innovation agenda depends on connecting this issue to the challenges above.

What higher education is for, its relationship to primary/secondary educational inequality and its contribution to addressing forced displacement need better articulation. These ideas, if brought together, represent a much more powerful, broader narrative for what access and equity in higher education means than exists at the moment.

The summit recognised that higher education has a role in empowering individuals, communities and countries. Michelle Obama, wife of US President Barack Obama, spoke of how it was her journey through higher education that had enabled a “young black girl from a working class family” to reach the White House.

Dr Yacoobi spoke of how her work in transforming education in Afghanistan embraced university as much as primary and secondary learning.

However, higher education has also to be more pro-active. For example, it needs to work collectively in taking the lead in offering opportunities for refugees from Syria and other conflict zones, rather than too often having to be pressed into making its contribution.

If it doesn't do this, it risks losing relevance, or at best being perceived to lose relevance, where the most pressing educational problems of the world are concerned.

Dr Graeme Atherton is chair of the Global Access to Post-Secondary Education, or GAPS, initiative.