New Frontiers of Higher Education in Europe

Abstract

T homas Jefferson believed that ‘every generation needs a new revolution’. It applies to higher education as well. Is it facing right now the next wave of turbulence? As soon as the COVID 19 crisis began to evaporate (October 2020) New York Times editorial announced that: ‘after the Pandemic, a revolution in education and work awaits’. In the years that followed, academia is subject to new powerful change drivers: dramatic massification and diversification of higher education worldwide due to a series of disruptive technological changes. Job markets analysis indicates that in the near future some form of higher education might become a precondition of every full-time employment contract. The percentage of the global inflow of students accommodated by European universities will be one of the key indicators of the relative ‘weight’ of Europe in the world. Of course, meeting this challenge would require abandoning the old dogma of ‘free higher education’ considered a part of the outdated 20th-century welfare state. Europeans will have to recognise that higher education is one of the fastest growing key industries of the future. A privileged position on this market is not given for granted, provided cut-throat global competition. One has to take under consideration that attractiveness of diplomas and 3–5 years of full-time studies is decreasing: skills are higher valued by leading employers than diplomas. From the perspective of the brightest of the students, technology and markets change too fast to wait for 3–5 years, learning too many things they consider useless. That is why we meet so many college dropouts in the big tech sector. European universities have to stand up and compete for the crème de la crème of the global young generation. The emerging environment of higher education calls for adjustment, which might transform itself into a ‘revolution of agility’, breaking traditional stiff structures and formalized procedures. These are new frontiers of higher education in Europe confronted with today’s US dominance and breathtaking development of