The student of the future is being shaped by the world of today. As global higher education adjusts to a significant moment of transition, Universitas 21 Provost Professor Jenny Dixon considers what future students might want and need, and how this will impact on the sector.
A major disruption to what we think of as traditional university life is at our door. The teaching model that universities across the globe use has been premised on students leaving school and taking a well-trodden path, attending physical classes on a university campus. This model no longer applies; times and expectations have changed around us. With a rapidly diversifying student population of digital natives, who have completely different expectations of their university experience, we know there can be no single new model. The future is open-ended, and higher education as a sector must try to navigate this.
For years, we noticed the winds of change slowly building, and these grew to a gale as a the global pandemic took hold. At the very centre of this disruption to life as we knew it were our students. As we move into a post-pandemic environment, U21 members are now focussing on their future students, what they want, what they need and what they expect.
One thing we can be certain of is that there is no single answer to the needs and expectations of our future students. The single most characterising feature of our current and future student cohorts is, and will continue to be, their sheer diversity. Age, ethnicity, socio-economic status, ability and approach to study - we see now that for many, it is increasingly a non-linear journey that can be a part-time or a longer-term undertaking.
The Covid-19 pandemic saw many of our member universities move their teaching rapidly online. Academics adapted to delivering courses virtually, enabling students to continue their studies through rolling lockdown restrictions. This suited many, but not all. And the ripples from this experience are continuing to impact teaching, learning and student experience even now.
Many students rushed back to campus-based learning as soon as their local Covid-19 regulations permitted. Yet for others, flexible learning has been irrevocably woven into their lives. It enables students who must work in order to fund their studies greater flexibility to balance their lives. For others, digital natives raised with the experience of interacting and connecting with friends virtually, studying online at a time that suits them is a welcome and natural progression, conveniently dovetailing with other parts of their lives.
However, there is much more to student life than attending lectures, labs, workshops, tutorials and son on. A rich and filling on-campus life awaits students through new friendships, clubs, sports, student unions and societies. Studying has never before been simply a transactional exercise - students have traditionally chosen a university almost as much for its social identity as for the quality of its teaching. This is reflected in the fact that student experience has become a key metric in university ranking of late, with millions routinely spent on cutting edge campus facilities such as sports halls.
And yet, increasingly we see a quite minimalist, pragmatic approach adopted by today's cohorts of students, many of whom are simply unwilling to travel long distances to high-cost cities for a few hours a day of classroom teaching.
For U21 members, the changing learning environment can be challenging. We must find a way to respond to students' developing needs and expectations, while at the same time ensuring that they receive the quality education a world-ranked, research-intensive university can offer. This has highly significant implications for the future of teaching and learning - and where to invest our limited resources.
For U21 campuses centred on research, the very foundation of our teaching and the basis of our future offering will likely be a mix of online and on-campus education. A central issue is whether enticing or compelling students to attend campus-based learning will support our ambitions on equity. There are no quick-fix answers in today's context of disruption and rapid development of technical solutions. Our U21 leaders tell us that the future will likely be marked by flexibility, adaptability and high-level responsiveness to ongoing change.
There are other societal forces and relevant issues at play that will shape the direction of travel. Climate change and sustainability are rightly a primary preoccupation for many of our young students. They respond to such issues with a strong focus on community. Our university campuses are one such community that is front and centre to them. The campus is a place for coming together, a locus for identity and solidarity. For many the disruption impacting the education sector has resulted in a regrettable loss of this sense of community. How do we as education providers address that?
As we contemplate what the future of university life could look like for our students, we must also reflect on what our respective societies want and need from the universities that serve them. We cannot focus solely on future models of teaching and learning. In an age of misinformation and disinformation, the university experience is especially vital in introducing student to new people and ideas, and teaching the skill of critical thinking.
Attending university lays foundational skills of analysis, evidence gathering and critical assessment, it provides tools for creative thinking and co-operative problem solving that are needed more than ever to meet the fundamental challenges facing our modern world.
Quite what the make up of these crucial skills looks like in a world that is changing rapidly before us is still unknown, but one thing is certain - higher education must be prepared to meet these new challenges for the sake of our staff, our communities, and most definitely our students.
U21 ran a panel event on the Student of the Future in October 2022.
>> View the recordings of our Student of the Future Symposium