The importance of universities is something I’ve written about a number of times, and a recent report from the London School of Economics highlights just how fundamental the sector is to the five pillars of the UK government’s industrial strategy.

For instance, universities obviously play a fundamental role in the skills and education of people across the economy, whether in terms of the workers who fuel growth, or the researchers who fuel innovation.

This research-led innovation is crucial to any modern economy, but especially one that aims to thrive based upon the knowledge and ideas of its companies and citizens.

They also offer a strong sense of place, with universities acting as anchors in their local communities, both in terms of the human capital they create, but also the innovation and engagement with local industry.

This is often exacerbated by incubators that aim to tap into the ideas generated by universities to help bring the latest research and thinking to market.

Universities and the public good

The impact of universities outside of academia is increasingly being understood.  As the University of Michigan’s Jason Owen Smith argues in his latest book Research Universities and the Public Good, high quality universities offer three unique components to a community:

• They are sources of knowledge and talent who converge in great diversity and scale on every university campus.
• They are community anchors who act as contributing institutional citizens for a region, with the longevity and stability of universities highly valuable.
• They are connecting hubs who funnel people and ideas from the local community and then back out into the wider world in a similar way to hub airports do.

Whilst the LSE authors believe that universities are fundamentally a force for good, they believe the sector faces a number of challenges if their power is to be maintained, not least in terms of ensuring a diverse student body in the coming years.  For the sector to retain its effectiveness, it’s vital that people from all backgrounds are able to attend university on merit, receiving the highest quality teaching as they do so.

“Inclusive growth requires university education to be accessible to students from different backgrounds,” the authors say. “There is still a gap between admissions of disadvantaged students and their advantaged peers, particularly in the most selective universities.”

Obviously central to this are financial reforms that have seen a larger proportion of the cost of education loaded onto the students themselves.  The authors argue that whilst these do not appear to have harmed accessibility, more needs to be done, especially around creating a fair maintenance system, whilst also providing better advice to potential students to help ensure those from disadvantaged backgrounds are not frozen out.

Global challenges

Likewise, much more can be done to improve the commercialisation of research, with perennial challenges involved in terms of fostering collaboration between industry and academia proving difficult to break down.

Central to this innovative success is the ability to attract the brightest minds from around the world, both as students and faculty.  It’s a task that is in considerable doubt as a result of the Brexit negotiations.

“Against a background of globalisation in higher education and increasing competition from elsewhere, Brexit represents a large source of uncertainty, through its likely impacts on the numbers and average quality of both students and staff,” the authors say. “As the UK redefines its relationship with the EU and the rest of the
world, it is essential that its universities continue to attract high quality international students, staff and research collaborations.”

Given the uncertainty that remains on Brexit, this is perhaps something that will remain clouded for a little while to come.