Global modernization, the growing middle class, and the highly connected and rapidly changing knowledge economy throughout the world are driving remarkable growth in higher education in developed and developing countries alike. After watching the achievements of U.S. higher education for fifty years, essentially every country expects greater contribution from its higher education system to elevate its quality of life and economic prosperity. Expansions and substantial reforms in higher education are underway nearly everywhere. These national needs and expectations from higher education pose large-scale strategic challenges for U.S. universities and their leadership.
This lecture introduces strategic university challenges that are generated by the ‘Course of the World’ described above and presents thirteen strategic issues for university consideration. Large, public research universities are the primary audience for these points though all organizations, colleges and universities will find relevance in many of them.
The global drivers underpinning the strategic challenges are the:
-
- Accelerating global change (information, technological, financial, environmental, security, energy, resources, health, et al.)
- Accessible and inexpensive global communications
- Partnerships and engagement as the paradigm for advancement
- Globalization, the irresistible force
- Global demand for access to higher education
- Expanding opportunities for people with in-demand talent
- The cost dilemma in U.S. higher education
- University opportunities for accelerating innovation
- Tackling the great global problems
- Modernizing the university culture.