January 2011
Big changes are about to take place in UK higher education in response to the government's plans to reform higher education funding, shifting the cost from government grants to student fees. Universities and agencies like QAA are thinking very seriously about how this will affect our relationship with students.
There is another challenge emerging though that I believe will have an equally profound effect on higher education, as well as providing great opportunities, and that is the arrival of Generation Y.
Generation Y is that generation of young people born throughout the 1990s and in the first few years of the new millennium. Their attitudes and worldview have, I believe, been shaped by two things:
These may seem like facts of life when we consider the effect they have had on our day to day lives, but for those young people who grew up during this period, they have shaped not just their attitudes but the way they see the world around them.
The economic environment has made them less fearful of change, confident about their prospects and the range of possibilities and opportunities available to them, expectant that they will have easy and unfettered access to material goods. The internet revolution has empowered and informed them in ways unimaginable fifteen years ago.
The ease with which facts and information can be accessed, checked and challenged by searching on Google or Wikipedia; the questions and challenges that can be posed instantly on Twitter or Facebook and answered by possibly hundreds or thousands of interlocutors; or the ease and rapidity with which the internet and organisations are able to learn from and respond to their users are not a phenomenon for this generation but facts of life, no more surprising than switching on an electric kettle or using a lawn mower would have been to earlier generations.
These are not challenges that should be added to the post-Browne consumer revolution, they are defining features that will be perpetuated by it. UK higher education has not achieved its success and international recognition by resting on its laurels. I am confident that HE providers will respond and adapt, and here are some ways in which I see them needing to do so: