Higher education across the world is facing a panoply of challenges that threaten to undermine or drastically alter its future. In the United States, universities are grappling with huge cuts to federal funding and pressure from the government to change their teaching and research agendas. In the United Kingdom, financial pressures are pushing some institutions to the brink of bankruptcy. Universities elsewhere, including in Germany and the Netherlands, face budget and research cuts. And in Japan and South Korea, private institutions are shutting their doors as ageing populations lead to declining numbers of students.
The future of universities
Meanwhile, technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), along with shifts towards remote learning in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, pose fundamental questions about how education should be delivered, and to whom. Across the world, governments with tight budgets and many competing demands are unable or unwilling to pay for the millions of students who want to attend universities.
How did universities reach this point? Over the past 200 years, the role of these institutions has changed drastically — from elite establishments focused on teaching a tiny proportion of the population to vast, sprawling businesses offering both research and education for large numbers of students (see ‘A twentieth-century boom’). Here, I explore how this revolution in higher education underlies the problems that universities face today.
Source: E. Schofer & J. W. Meyer Am. Sociol. Rev. 70, 898–920 (2005).
Deep history
Universities have their origins in religious or state-run institutions for training elite groups and specialists. Records go back as far as ad 427 in India, where Nalanda University, in what is now Bihar, developed Buddhist thought and taught skills such as medicine, mathematics and alchemy. In China, institutions that centred on the teachings of the philosopher Confucius first arose around 200 bc.
The world’s oldest university still in operation is the University of Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco. Established as a mosque in ad 869, it evolved over the following centuries to teach a broad range of subjects — from the Quran to grammar, medicine and astronomy.
Universities are — and must continue to be — a force for good
The birthplace of the Western academic conventions that the world’s universities now follow — formal lectures and official qualifications — was the University of Bologna in Italy. Founded in 1088, it came into being when groups of foreign students in the city began to pool funds to hire scholars to lecture them. With few students and limited curricula, it mainly prepared young people for careers in the church, law, medicine and government. The University of Oxford, UK, followed in 1096 and the University of Paris in 1150, although they were run by professors instead of students.
The next structural shift came in 1810, when philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt conceived the world’s first research-intensive university in Berlin, then the capital of Prussia. Aiming to bring cutting-edge science into universities and to advance the region’s development, he set up subject faculties and established graduate education programmes, in which researchers trained future scientists1. In doing so, he linked teaching and research for the first time. His innovation, which was funded by the state, contributed to the emergence of Prussia as a top scientific power. And following unification in 1871, also to that of Germany.
This university model has shaped higher education ever since. The United States and Japan were among the first to adopt it2, beginning in the 1860s. By the early twentieth century, universities across Europe had broadly taken on the Humboldtian-style dual focus of cutting-edge research coupled with education of the next generation of elite minds. The founding of Peking University in 1898 brought a similar system to China.
Thousands of students in Japan try to attend a lecture in a hall with a capacity for 1,000.Credit: Rodrigo Reyes Marin/AFLO/Alamy
The universities of the late-nineteenth century enrolled around 80,000 students in Europe and 49,000 in the United States — under 1% of each population (based on reported3 values and my estimates). But the Humboldtian approach proved eminently scalable, as the skills taught by universities became essential for rapidly expanding industrializing economies. By 1930, there were an estimated 650,000 students in universities in Europe and 1.1 million in the United States, reflecting the wider educational base in the country. Elite groups still dominated student numbers, but there were more opportunities for others — and, for the first time, women were enrolling in significant numbers.
In much of the rest of the world, these developments came later. Areas under colonial domination had little higher education, and the universities that did exist mainly trained civil servants4. But the aftermath of the Second World War brought dramatic changes to the university system worldwide. The emergence of the United States as a global superpower, the rebuilding of Europe and Japan, the end of much of colonialism and the rise of nationalism in newly independent economies, and, around 1980, the emergence of China as a major power led to the establishment of new universities worldwide. In many Western countries, an expanding middle class demanded access to higher education, which was seen as key to social mobility, driving even higher student numbers.
Mass expansion
As a result, university enrolments expanded dramatically5 from 6 million globally in 19506 to 264 million in 2023. By 2024, almost all countries, except those in sub-Saharan Africa, were enrolling at least 50% of students leaving secondary school in higher education of some form, although young people from lower social class groups and those from minority ethnic groups remain under-represented7. China’s growth in particular has been remarkable — student enrolment in 1978 was 860,000, but by 2018 this number had reached 45 million1. The changes came after China jettisoned the Soviet Union university model of free but ideologically restricted education, which was adopted after the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, in favour of an academic structure modelled largely on the US system.
Universities under fire must harness more of the financial value they create
The remit of higher education expanded in the 1960s to cater to students’ diverse academic backgrounds and interests, with a growing focus on employment skills for rapidly changing economies. The United States pioneered vocational community colleges and teaching-focused state and private colleges and universities, alongside its Humboldtian-style flagship institutes. Other countries developed similar, multipart systems — Germany, for example, has vocational colleges and teaching-oriented universities of applied science alongside conventional research-focused universities, as do most European countries.
The trend to increase access to education has placed severe financial burdens on governments worldwide. Politicians have faced a choice: maintain free (or very low cost) higher education for ever-increasing student numbers, often at the cost of academic quality; or impose tuition fees to pay for the expansion8. Only a few countries have chosen the first option. The rest have shifted the cost of education mostly to students, and instituted student-loan programmes to help pay the bills.
The unwillingness of governments to pay for mass higher education has created a huge private higher-education sector — mainly geared towards high-demand fields such as business administration, with the exception of some elite, research-intensive institutes in the United States. One-third of global enrolments are now in private higher education9. In Japan and South Korea, 80% of students attend private universities; in the Philippines, this figure is about 50%9.
