Future of Higher Education

Gábor Király and Zsuzsanna Géring (RC07 board member) were guest editors for Futures (Volume 111, August 2019) with a special section on ’Futures of Higher Education’.

In their Editorial they identify certain global trends that create significant challenges to higher education, such as climate change, global migration flows, political tensions, depression epidemic, digitalisation and robotisation. Not only these trends, but the interplay between them, lead to pressing questions such as how we can prepare student for future challenges, and what role higher education should play in shaping future societies. Therefore, future discussion and systematic investigation is crucial to collectively elaborate alternative organisational forms for HE, as well as to create a diverse HE ecosystem. The papers of this special issue address these questions from different angles and at different levels.

The papers:

Elmar Schüll: Current trends and future challenges of the Austrian Universities of Applied Sciences 

Kadri Aavik: Crafting neoliberal futures in the strategic plans of Estonian universities 

Lars Geer Hammershøj: The perfect storm scenario for the university: Diagnosing converging tendencies in higher education 

Fátima Monteiro, Carlinda Leite, Cristina Rocha: Ethical education as a pillar of the future role of higher education: Analysing its presence in the curricula of engineering courses

Andrea Toarniczky, Réka Matolay, Judit Gáspár: Responsive higher education through transformational practices – The case of a Hungarian business school

Mduduzi Nkosinathi Gladwin Mtshali, Radhamany Sooryamoorthy: A research-inducing environment at a University of Technology in South Africa: Challenges and future prospects

Mark Murphy, Cristina Costa: Digital scholarship, higher education and the future of the public intellectual