Universities are — and must continue to be — a force for good

Universities have a long and storied history. Al-Qarawiyyin University in Fez, Morocco, which was founded in the ninth century, is often cited as the world’s oldest continuously operating higher-education institution. The New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering (NMITE) in Hereford, UK, is one of the newest, seeking to reinvent engineering education for the current century.

The future of universities

Our reporter explores NMITE in a Careers feature as part of a special Nature issue on the future of universities, which also kicks off a series of related articles over the coming months. We’re examining the many challenges that higher education is facing globally — ranging from hostile politics to funding pressures to the role of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in teaching and learning. These all add up to arguably the most pivotal moment in the history of universities. As so often before, they must reinvent themselves to survive.

Universities are undoubtedly a huge global success story. As education-policy researcher Philip Altbach, founding director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College in Massachusetts, writes in a Comment, the original concept of academies that trained (exclusively male) religious and later secular elites has morphed since the Second World War into broad-based institutions of teaching and research. The world’s student population has ballooned from 6 million in 1950 to more than 260 million in 2023. In most societies, a majority of young people aspire to graduate with a degree.

The great university shake-up: four charts show how global higher education is changing

Universities are now central to most nations’ future-proofing, as we describe in a News feature. They enable young people to explore their interests and passions and prepare for the world of work. They have also become the go-to institutions for research and the generation of ideas, and therefore they are engines for both economic growth and social mobility.

But universities now face crucial, even existential, questions. One of which is how to fund these institutions. In the first heady decades of expansion after 1945, governments in some wealthy countries explicitly saw higher education as part of education. They picked up a large portion of the bill and there was little or no charge for students and their families, just as there was no fee for going to school or college.

No lectures, exams, essays: inside a twenty-first-century university

In today’s world of mass participation in higher education, the idea that universities should be free-to-access is under severe pressure — particularly now that economies, especially in high-income countries, have been growing much more slowly, if at all, since the financial crisis in 2008.

Many governments have been transferring the cost of higher education onto students and their families, often through loans that are paid back over many years. Private capital has also become more involved in funding higher education, especially in countries with comparatively fewer high-quality public universities. This means that some universities have started to become less like institutions of public service and more like businesses, which raises fundamental questions about who they are for, how they should operate and how the broadest possible access can be maintained.

How universities came to be — and why they are in trouble now

The tensions surrounding financing extend to funding research, especially in the United States and Europe. University research budgets have, in general, been protected from severe cuts, in part because, over the years, governments have been persuaded by economists that an investment in research is an investment in growth. Researchers are having to remake the case for continued increases in funding when there is less money for essential public services in society, including those relied on by people living in poverty.

These tensions have been exacerbated in many parts of the world — again led by the United States and Europe — because higher education has become a point of societal division, and a target of attacks by populist leaders who accuse universities of not fully representing all shades of the social and political spectrum in their teaching and research. Increasing restrictions on visas and immigration in many countries are also straining a model that has become reliant on international movement both of students — who often pay higher fees than do their domestic peers — and of researchers.

Universities under fire must harness more of the financial value they create

To meet these challenges, universities must take the future into their own hands. As Yasheng Huang, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, writes in a World View article, one approach they can take in an era of dwindling, less-reliable public funding is to claim back more of the value they generate for society. Universities should think seriously about the strategies advised by Huang that allow them to capture more of the wealth they generate before it goes out their doors.

Universities must move with the times: how six scholars tackle AI, mental health and more

But there is much more that universities should be doing. In a Comment, six researchers from around the world describe the projects that they are undertaking to transform the experience of higher education and make it more fit for purpose — such as expanding the role of AI in medical education, boosting the employability of PhD holders and embedding creativity in science training.

Generating fresh ideas lies at the heart of what universities exist to do. Universities are — and must continue to be — a force for good. They must turn more of their innate, innovative capacity back on themselves to continue to thrive.