Realising the educational potential of mass higher education

There is an increasing disillusionment with mass higher education from both sides of the political spectrum. From the political left, there is a sense of the betrayal of higher education’s promise. This is ascribed to the corporatisation of universities, with a lower quality education offered to students and institutions more focused on prestige and money than speaking truth to power in the face of human atrocities and the devastation of the planet. From the political right, higher education is seen as uninterested in advocating for freedom of speech, having been taken over by a left-wing elite who do not provide anything of educational value to students.

Whilst coming from different directions these perspectives share the common concern that, in the move to mass higher education, educational rigour has been lost. As a greater number and variety of students have access to higher education, it is claimed that more and more students who are not interested in learning, are studying in impoverished educational institutions, that are not interested in educating them. There are increasingly urgent questions raised about why university degrees demand that students study over several years, in special institutions, taught by expensive teachers who are committed to sustained scholarship in their subject areas. 

Does higher education transform students?

Often, the response to these kinds of questions is to argue for the transformative power of higher education. Yet whilst the process of transformation may seem plausible in the arts, humanities and social sciences, does it meaningfully describe how students benefit from studying more fact-based STEM subjects, which are seen as crucial to the global economy? We tried to answer this question through a seven-year longitudinal international research project involving students studying undergraduate degrees in chemistry or chemical engineering in England, South Africa and the USA. These students were from six universities with different levels of prestige, and we followed them from their first undergraduate year for up to four years after graduation.

We found that the educational potential of these STEM-based degrees lay in the ways that they brought students into relationship to knowledge, that changed their way of engaging with the world. This involved degree programmes taking students inside knowledge so that they could understand how it was relevant for their engagement with the world. Importantly, the knowledge that students engaged with did not consist of single, coherent, authoritative, flat and fixed pieces of knowledge. They were bodies of knowledge that had a structure, and it was this structure that allowed students and graduates to use this knowledge in a variety of contexts

For students to develop these relationships with structured bodies of knowledge and to go inside knowledge, they needed to understand their study of their subjects as an educational process. If students saw their study of their degree only in instrumental terms, they tended not to see these bodies of knowledge from the inside and were less able to use the knowledge from their degrees in a variety of contexts once they had graduated.  

So what?

If this is the case for supposedly fact-based subjects, it seems likely that it will also be the case across higher education. Understanding the educational potential of higher education in this way helps to answer the urgent questions prompted by the disillusionment with mass higher education.

This is because giving students access to these structured bodies of knowledge is dependent on the programmatic nature of higher education and students being engaged with these bodies of knowledge over an extended period. It requires educational institutions to create the conditions in which this can happen. This is why students need to intensively study systematic degree programmes over several years in special institutions with teachers who have living relationships to knowledge they are teaching. This education cannot be offered by stacking micro-credentials like Lego bricks with no attention given to who is learning them and how they can be sequenced to support particular students to develop understanding.   

In the face of disillusionment with mass higher education, it takes a great deal of confidence and nerve for universities to modestly assert the value of engaging students with structured of bodies of knowledge. Yet this is where the educational potential of mass higher education lies. Universities are staffed by the most highly educated people in the world; if we cannot meet the challenge of explaining this to wider society, then how much is our belief in the power of knowledge and education actually worth?