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INTERNATIONAL HIGHER EDUCATION

Demographic Challenges and Future of the Higher Education

Manja Klemencic and Jochen Fried
Manja Klemencic is a postdoctoral fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. E-mail: m.klemencic.01@cantab.net. Jochen Fried is director of education initiatives at the Salzburg Seminar, Salzburg, Austria. E-mail: jfried@salzburgseminar.org.

The demographic prospects certainly add a new dimension to the familiar pressures on higher education. It is surprising then that these factors are so rarely addressed in relevant scholarly literature or in the higher education policy arena. The aim of this special section of International Higher Education (IHE) is to highlight demography in higher education planning and to encourage further research on this theme. The articles in this special section of IHE result from presentations at the Salzburg Seminar session, Shifting Demographics in Higher Education, conducted in November 2006.

Higher education is rapidly becoming a universal aspiration. Over the past decades, the number of students has been increasing steadily across the world, and according to some projections the student number will almost double to reach 160 million by 2025. This trend, however, will play out in very dissimilar ways given the diverging demographic developments in different parts of the world. Studies predict that until 2020 and beyond in most of the developed world, especially in Europe, populations will decline rapidly, while in developing countries, especially in Asia and Africa, the number of people will continue to grow. At the same time, life expectancy is also undergoing dramatic changes, rising continuously where countries prosper, but remaining stagnant or even decreasing where countries are falling behind.

These demographic trends have far-reaching implications for higher education. In regions where the anticipated increase in population is matched by the prospect of an overall improvement of socioeconomic conditions, as in Asia, the rising demand for higher education will accelerate. By comparison, the declining birthrates in Europe combined with a stable socioeconomic situation may result in an excess supply of higher education in terms of domestic demand. While some regions will struggle to provide education, especially quality education, for all eligible individuals, others will engage in an ever fiercer "battle for brainpower," as described in an article in the Economist (October 6, 2006). The new knowledge society requires a steady turnout of an increasingly highly qualified workforce as well a substantial pool of competent knowledge producers. To be able to accomplish these tasks, any higher education system needs a critical number of student intakes, whether domestic or foreign, "traditional" (i.e., 18-to-24-year-olds) or "nontraditional" older students.

Implications for Enrollments
Demographic projections of the student population combine the number of actual births or birthrates with the expected percentage of people who will seek higher education. These projections are further fine-tuned by factoring in the anticipated mobility or migration of prospective students, both those leaving their home country to seek higher education abroad and those likely to enter a given country. The projections are also used to take into account the effects of a growing percentage of lifelong learners who in some countries are already outpacing the growth rate of traditional students. On the institutional level, the projections can also take account of the competition for talents between universities domestically and abroad. Generally speaking, however, despite the data that are available, the issue of demography is receiving only minimal or shortsighted attention among decision makers at the political as well as the institutional level.

The projections by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development alert us to the significant shifts in the number and the nature of the student population by 2050. Europe is facing a rapid decline in birthrates, resulting in an inverse population pyramid with a shrinking proportion of 18-to-24-year-olds and a growing segment of the aging population. It is predicted that only through immigration can Europe reverse this trend. Some people argue, as do Mizikaci and Baumgartl in their article, that even a (politically highly controversial) expansion of the number of immigrants would ease but not undo this trend. Participation in higher education grew in almost all countries in Europe over the last decade, with most spectacular increases in central and eastern Europe after the end of the post-1989 planned access policy. However, there exist clear indicators that the demographic impact is likely to result in a decline of total student numbers before 2020, despite a growing demand for education generally and the rising number of mature students. The potential implications for higher education are enormous: unless foreign students are being imported in large numbers, higher education institutions in Europe will inevitably be reduced in numbers and size.

The predictions for the United States are in general less looming. The US population is expected to grow steadily because of relatively high birthrates (primarily among the African-American and Hispanic population) and the assumption that the flow of immigration to the United States will continue. Accordingly, no significant decline in the demand for higher education, based on demographic shifts, is expected. Also, it seems reasonable to assume that the United States, with some of the finest higher education establishments in the world, will retain its role as the major world importer of foreign students—despite the strong competition for attracting talents from countries such as Canada, Australia or the United States and self-inflicted limitations like the introduction of US visa restrictions.

Most Asian and African countries show different prospects. In both regions, a quickly expanding demand for higher education beyond 2020 is expected. This trend is due to relatively high birthrates (especially in Africa), improved socioeconomic status (especially in Asia), and governments' systematic efforts of removing obstacles hampering access to higher education. In both regions, but especially in Africa (as discussed by Shabani) and among the lesser developed Asian nations (as indicated by Dunrong), the participation rate of the relevant age cohorts in higher education is still very low and the governments as well as international donor organizations are working very hard to improve it.

Challenges Ahead
Demographic trends will transform higher education systems, though differently across world regions. Where the pool of domestic students in the traditional 18-to-24-year age cohort is expected to decrease, the competition for these students among higher education institutions will become stronger, creating incentives for the recruitment of foreign students and for supplementing the traditional students with lifelong learners. Thus, higher education institutions will have to adjust their academic programs and organizational structures and become more permeable, de-emphasizing their social selectivity and accommodating the needs of an increasingly diverse student population.

These transformations will meet the interest of institutions to maintain their existence as much as in the interest of governments and the business community for a highly qualified workforce and knowledge producers to sustain the dynamic and volatile knowledge economies. These challenges will be further exacerbated by the retirements of academics, which unless coupled with a steady supply of young researchers will result in a shrinking pool of knowledge producers and thus potentially a stagnation of knowledge societies. At the same time, in other regions of the world (as in China), the dire need to provide more access to higher education and to increase the student population involves the same dilemmas that characterized the so-called massification elsewhere of how to square the circle between funding, structural adaptation, and quality of education.

[Online] Available: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/Number47/p12_Klemencic_Fried.htm