Are universities redundant?

Modern higher education is faced with a common problem regardless of location and developmental contexts: How do we educate students in a time of disruption? This is a disruption that is occurring at every level – societal, cultural, economic and environmental – and is echoed within institutions of higher education through rapid changes in tuition, enrolment, diversity of student populations and medium of instruction (Christensen et al., 2003). The context in which learning occurs is rapidly changing and we, as educators and those interested in the place and position of higher education, must wrap our minds around just how we adapt and respond. For example, how do we deal with the fact that a graduate today enters what is described as the ‘four-year career’ (Kamenetz, 2012)? Indeed, graduates today may end up with something like seven to nine careers in their lifetime. That is not seven to nine jobs, but actually career changes. Even for those remaining within the same industry, statistics show that the number of people in the United States aged 25–64 who held the same job for more than ten years fell from 51% in 1980 to 39% in 2005. Today, we can think of living in a world inhabited by what has been described as ‘Generation Flux’ (Safian, 2012). How, then, do educators prepare students for such an environment? The truth is that traditionally we do not do very well at it. Universities are 1,000-year-old institutions based on distinct disciplines that students select before they enter and often continue on a journey of specialisation until they graduate. While the world has changed drastically over the last few decades requiring multi-disciplinary and modal thinking, the vast majority of universities tend to maintain a philosophy of education similar to that at the turn of the twentieth century: delivery of disciplinary-based content.