! 7 ! TechKnowLogia, January/February, 2000 © Knowledge Enterprise, Inc. www.TechKnowLogia.org Higher Education Higher Education Higher Education Higher Education Facing the Challenges of the 21 st Century Jamil Salmi Education Sector Manager Latin America and the Caribbean Region, The World Bank 1 Introduction Imagine a university without buildings or classrooms or even a library. Imagine a university ten thousand miles away from its students, delivering on-line programs or offering its courses through franchise institutions overseas. Imagine a university without academic departments, without required courses or majors or grades. Imagine a college proposing a bachelor’s degree in Individualized Studies or in Interdisciplinary Studies. Imagine a degree valid only for five years after graduation. Imagine a higher education system where institutions are ranked not by the quality of their teachers, but by the intensity of electronic wiring and the degree of Internet connectivity. Imagine a country whose main export earnings come from the sale of higher education services. Imagine a socialist country which charges tuition fees to obtain full cost recovery in public higher education. Are we entering the realm of science fiction? Or are these evocations real-life stories of revolution in the world of higher education on the eve of the 21 st century? In the past few years, many countries have witnessed significant transformations and reforms in their higher education systems, including the emergence of new types of institutions, changes in patterns of financing and governance, the establishment of evaluation and accreditation mechanisms, curriculum reforms, and technological innovations. But the tertiary education landscape is not changing as fast everywhere. At Oxford University, New College is a venerable sixteenth century institution. The oldest university of the American continent, the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, is about to collapse under the pressure of its 80,000 students that are crowding facilities originally designed to accommodate only 6,000 students. The largest university in the world, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has been paralyzed since April 1999 by a strike over the Rector’s decision to increase tuition fees by the equivalent of US$140. In this rapidly evolving world, what is likely to happen to those higher education institutions, which are not willing or able to change? To answer this question, this article is divided into two parts. It looks first at the new challenges characterizing the environment in which higher education institutions operate and compete on the eve of the 21 st century. Second, it examines some concrete implications of these challenges for higher education leaders, looking at promising trends and experiences in countries and institutions which have taken the lead in introducing reforms and innovations. The New Challenges There are three major, intertwined new challenges which bear heavily on the role and functions of higher education: (a) economic globalization, (b) the growing importance of knowledge, and (c) the information and communication revolution. Globalization is the process of growing integration of capital, technology, and information across national boundaries in such a way as to create an increasingly integrated world market, with the direct consequence that more and more countries and firms have no choice but to compete in the global economy. This is not to mean that globalization is necessarily a good thing or a bad phenomenon. Many people see it as a major source of opportunities, while critics decry the dangers of inter- dependency, such as the risk of transferring financial crises from one country to the other. But globalization is happening, whether one likes it or not, and every country in the world, every firm, and every working person has to live with it. The second dimension of change is the growing role of knowledge. Economic development is increasingly linked to a nation’s ability to acquire and apply technical and socio- economic knowledge, and the process of globalization is accelerating this trend. Comparative advantages come less and less from abundant natural resources or cheaper labor, and more and more from technical innovations and the com- petitive use of knowledge. The proportion of goods with a medium-high and high level of technology content in inter- national trade has gone from 33 percent in 1976 to 54 percent in 1996. 2 Today, economic growth is more a process of knowledge accumulation than of capital accumulation. In this context, economies of scope, derived from the ability to design and offer different products and services with the same technology, are becoming a more powerful driving “It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” - Charles Darwin