Report

A call for radical reform: Higher education for a sustainable economy

This report from UK think tank HEPI suggests shorter courses, spreading the cost over time while encouraging lifelong updating of skills and knowledge.

A new Debate Paper from the Higher Education Policy Institute by Professor Tim Blackman argues that full-time honours degrees were created when universities were small and elite institutions. They were rolled over into the modern mass system of higher education we have today with little thought about the appropriateness and affordability of providing such a large volume of learning straight after school, with the educational content expected to last a lifetime.

Instead, Professor Tim Blackman says more people need to be studying shorter courses, spreading the cost over time while encouraging lifelong updating of skills and knowledge.

The author, who previously led The Open University, argues that a new system would better suit learners at different life stages and would make commuting or online learning more feasible, instead of incurring the expense of relocating to study residential courses.

This is one of several far-reaching recommendations made in A Call for Radical Reform: Higher Education for a Sustainable Economy (HEPI Debate Paper 41) to reshape higher education so that it focuses on two challenges that Professor Blackman says are ‘existential’:

• An unsustainable economy caused by over-consumption driving climate change.
• Misinformation, which is corroding common standards of knowledge and our ability to act together as a society to tackle these challenges.

Universities, the report argues, are uniquely placed to prevent what could be catastrophic breakdowns in our economy, environment and democracy. They can provide the skills and knowledge needed for the transition to a sustainable economy, which requires re-industrialisation on a huge scale. And they can establish common standards for agreeing facts and how certain we can be about them, based on respect for evidence and openness to criticism.

The recently announced plans for post-16 education and skills provision in England are a step in the right direction by strengthening education and training for all young people and introducing more flexibility into lifelong learning. But Professor Blackman argues that the higher education reforms do not go far enough, add more complexity to an already complex system and fail to learn from past policy failures.

He calls for more radical action, with direct government intervention in higher education, greater standardisation of courses and leaner regulation. He singles out the complex and expensive ‘apparatus’ of England’s Office for Students for criticism, suggesting that an alternative, less costly approach to regulating the quality of higher education would be commissioners overseeing universities’ strategies and how performance is reported to their governing bodies.