Universities need to prove their value to local communities

Everyone wants universities to be globally competitive, successful and locally relevant. A whole ‘global’ world has been shaped in higher education in recent decades, full of envy-inspiring luxury brands, national excellence initiatives, superstar scholars and ‘world class’ rhetoric.

In the 1990s domestic consumer guides proliferated to inform prospective students. These ratings primed the sector for more aspirational global rankings. The global era stimulated university researchers and executives, who are invariably ambitious and competitive people.

The opening and growth of world trade inspired governments to loosen policy levers and enable people and funds to flow between more porous national systems. Higher education was liberalised and opened to market forces.

Make universities part of the community

It is time to step back, take a breath, and find ways to make universities palpitate, be vibrant and more integral in their community.

Universities do lots for local communities, though it is often complex, quiet and opaque. And they can always do more. Lately, universities have focused too much on impact, policy advocacy and pleasing the markets.

All universities, even the most global, serve interests and needs which are much closer to home. Along with striving for global reputation, academics might be incentivised to contribute to local businesses and organisations.

Before the obsession with performance measurement, universities reported how they engaged and partnered with their community, and what progress was made to make a difference. What metrics would incentivise relevant institutional behaviour?

The intentions driving a striving to articulate broader contributions are clear. At the widest level, enhancing engagement seeks to ensure that contemporary and future university governance, management and stewardship processes support effective social engagement.

Progress in this area should ensure that universities are accessible, outward-reaching and responsive to communities. It should increase the social, environmental and economic value of lifelong learning and research to the benefit of university communities.

Aligning and situating academic endeavours within social contexts will deliver high-quality teaching, learning and research which responds to social needs.

Designing indicators to collect data from multiple regions or multiple universities should inform monitoring, improvement and enhancement initiatives.

Disrupting the dominant logic

Major thinking and development are taking place around universities’ environmental sustainability and their economic and social impact. Research on the social engagement of universities is in its infancy, but it is increasingly popular and propelled by the quest for new relevance.

As higher education shifts into new futures, big interest narrows around how to understand and hence boost the value created and contributed to a diverse range of communities.

What ideas, stories, forms of evaluation, information and data can shape transformation and growth? How can we build on existing foundations and carve new tracks?

Two dominant assumptions are reshaping contemporary higher education.

First, it is evident that the ‘social dimension’ has grown beyond a remote or negotiated ‘vertical’ and is instead playing an integrated role in reshaping the core.

During the recent global growth era, universities negotiated various points of social engagement around specific programmes, campuses and projects. Universities’ agreements with government were loose on engagement with community.

Being relevant in a ‘globally connected and locally relevant’ universal era requires a much more integrated perspective in which community is a grounding rather than consequence of academic work.

Second, shifting to an integrated or universal space sparks new academic and institutional assumptions. Under the ‘world-class logic’, globally striving universities parlay tuition revenue into research and specifically publication outcomes to inflate the university brand in order to stimulate consumption and growth.

Community connection and engagement have taken a backseat. According to a ‘social-relevance logic’ already being implemented at scale in major systems, universities create value on many fronts, parlay this into many forms of augmented engagement, expand their scope and the scale of their contributions and generate multidimensional successes.

This broader view embraces accomplishments in addressing workforce needs and tackling government and industry challenges.

Curating new perspectives

Higher education needs to get back to basics and capture more of the imagination around how universities make a difference in society, in place, with meaningful lifelong learning, and research which aims to solve the key challenges of this era. Universities need to make the third mission the core pillar.

There remains a pressing need for information that helps institutions and people discover how to best engage, create and contribute with higher education. What sort of information is likely to impel future higher education leaders to reach beyond the prevailing arrangements and create socially relevant value?

Recent large-scale evaluation has advanced workable options around dimensions designed to be of immediate relevance to system policy (ie, legitimacy and ideological context), institutional leadership (ie, relevance), academic practice (ie, enablers), and consumer interests (ie, transparency).

The dimensions go well beyond institution-level preoccupations with research scores.

Emphasising the following four dimensions is necessary to shift into the integrated and socially relevant phase.

1. Education success is the core of most of the world’s higher education institutions. Any useful architecture must embrace education success in terms of student admissions, engagement and learning outcomes, and graduate destinations and career progression. Resting system and institution growth expectations on indicators will ensure rapid technical development. Education is too important to ignore and leave to wane.

2. Research productivity comprises faculty output, research quality and academic impact. To date, research rankings have exploited bibliometric data to emphasise the volume and peer-recognition of a researcher’s or department’s output.

To frame future practice, it is essential to add more advanced metrics relating to engagement and pathways for impact. These metrics cover conventional products derived directly from research like publications, patents and doctoral enrolments and completions, but also step beyond to examine links with industry, public impact and the creation of shared value.

In recent years, there has been increased emphasis on measuring universities’ progress towards achieving the sustainable development agenda and policy impact. New data on research has the capacity to stimulate new kinds of socially relevant research, beyond prevailing reductionist approaches.

3. Social contribution can be viewed as spanning regional engagement, national development and international impact.

The scope of such engagement is, of course, shaped by the mission, scale of the university and locations in which it operates and serves. In general terms, social contribution may be organised into forms of engagement that stem from leading education and research, operations and governance. For instance:

• Education-related forms of engagement might include the extent of open courseware, the provision of community-based education and the contribution of graduates and alumni.

• Research contributions can take account of the scope and scale of projects and startups, staff exchanges, engagement via media and lectures, and more traditional academic service contributions.

• Institution-related contributions might take account of a university’s networks and partnerships (within and across jurisdictions), the public use of facilities and even the provision of strategic plans and budgets for such engagement; and

• University’s stewardship and outreach initiatives focused on environmental sustainability and partnering with civic society to progress the sustainable development agenda.

4. Institutional stewardship is an important facet of any reporting system which helps higher education institutions develop. Institutional growth is about governance and leadership, management effectiveness and the creation of distinctive value.

Indicator systems must provide scope for each university to define and demonstrate their own unique excellence. To enable this, indicator architectures must draw on proven and innovative managerial and actuarial perspectives about how to understand and advance the success or productivity of higher education institutions.

New indicators

The above dimensional architecture paves the need and foundations for designing indicators which really define and establish the social characteristics of future universities.

These frameworks furnish different perspectives, bring out the complexities of drawing tight boundaries around inherently complex academic work and reveal that much prior work has gained little traction and the need to identify social characteristics which are internationally generalisable.

The four dimensions serve exclusive information needs. For instance, excellent research and education can go together, but they often do not, and any assumption that great research implies education success is easy to prove false. Likewise, being managed well does not mean that a university is socially influential.

Over the past 20 years, universities have become less interested in benchmarking and have relied too much on high-level measurement, rather than understanding and assessing the economic, environmental, social and cultural impact of higher education on a particular geographical location.

Establishing that data is robust on a large scale is always challenging, but there is substantial room to align techniques in this field with expected standards in broader education cross-national assessment studies. Clearly, development will be patterned by a range of forces.

Imagining different futures

Higher education needs to move a long way to touch, embrace and progress in positive ways. As the ‘integrated socially relevant logic’ conveys, this cannot happen with higher education alone.

It is necessary to unshackle universities from current operating environments which have come to threaten system and institutional growth. Environmental mechanisms built up over the last few decades are yielding diminishing returns. It is time to open space and options for creative development, imagining different futures.

Doing this makes it possible to define perspectives that are helpful for paving alternative value indicators. Tracing the implications of these activities is helpful for spurring entrepreneurial transformations.

Hamish Coates is professor of public policy, director of the Higher Education Futures Lab, and global tertiary education expert. Angel Calderon is director of strategic insights at RMIT University, Australia. Full and summary briefing: www.hefl.net.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.