Who is causing the decline of higher education?

FMT:

Who is causing the decline of higher education?

Universities around the world are in a deep existential crisis with mass redundancies, a collapse in legitimacy and increasing irrelevance as a route to well-paid graduate jobs

Higher education, at least in the Anglophone world, is in a worse state than I have known in more than 30 years as an academic.

In the UK 40% of universities are in financial crisis according to the Office for Students, with the University and College Union reporting 15,000 job losses this year and thousands more to come.


In the US a recent NBC News poll showed only 33% of respondents agreed that a degree is “worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime”. Almost two thirds or 63% agreed that it is “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off”.

The global malaise is reflected in Malaysia through everything from “kangkung professors”, fake degrees, unaccredited programmes to Romano-Melayu shipbuilding.

Universities have lost their purpose. Originally, they were communities of teachers and scholars, “universitas magistrorum et scholarium”. Access was limited to small self-contained communities of like-minded people primarily focused on scholastic activities.

During the 1990s, democratisation and commercialisation turned universities into uplifted training centres. Open access based on ability to pay, mostly with loans, turned the primary focus to “students as customers” and “creating industry-ready graduates for the job market”.

This has created a landscape of crisis. Global legitimacy has been eroded by the spectacle of Ivy League presidents humiliated in US Congress hearings and the Australian government forced to regulate its rogue vice-chancellors.

In Malaysia legitimacy is eroded by poor rankings celebrated on social media by vice-chancellors hobnobbing in expensive international commercial marketing conferences while their students and staff struggle to make ends meet.


The financial crisis is deepening with 40% of UK, 66% of Australian and 33% of US universities in financial crisis. In Malaysia 55% of private universities were loss-making and 64% in some form of stress in 2018 and this is likely to be worse now.

The crisis of relevance is also beginning to bite with graduate starting salaries matching minimum wages in the UK and here in Malaysia, high underemployment levels all around the world, with 35.5% of Malaysian graduates underemployed.

There is a growing consensus that the current “zombie university” model is “functionally dead”.

Traditional teaching and learning struggles to keep up with high quality free content available online. Research is underfunded and located outside of universities.


For instance, the entire UK R&D budget is US$25.5 billion for 2024/25 compared to Google’s US$50 billion and Microsoft’s US$29 billion annual R&D spend. Collegiality and community impact is eroded by online distant learning and the Gen Z effect, where students prefer virtual interaction leading to reducing student interaction on campus.

The signal of a high-status degree losing value is when commercial, for-profit rankings claim that start-up universities are as good as established institutions. Alumni networks are not strong, and affiliation ties are very weak after graduation. The functional, vocational attitude restricts opportunities to grow and develop as a person — so-called self-actualisation.

In pointing fingers, the government and the market are not to blame. All universities face the same policy and economic environment and some do well while others do badly. So the responsibility lies with the people within the universities themselves.

Money-grubbing university owners and leaders, who upgrade their own pay and expensive cars annually, are clearly culpable but academics must also accept their share of responsibility. In a community of teachers and scholars, it is never the fault of the students.

As standards of academic quality, relevance and legitimacy decline the people who create and deliver those standards are responsible.