Is This Higher Education’s ‘Kodak Moment’? 

This HEPI blog was kindly authored for HEPI by Mark Jones, Head of EMEA at Curio Group (@curio_group).

In the summer of 2024, I attended three excellent HEPI and related events that highlighted the hard choices facing UK higher education. At HEPI’s 2024 Annual Conference, the focus was on funding prospects post-election. The King’s Policy Institute (KCL)/HEPI webinar explored four future scenarios for the sector offered by Sir Chris Husbands. The discussion at the most recent HEPI partners’ dinner explored the global challenges facing the UK sector. All surfaced the changing demands on higher education, shifting employer needs, and the deepening financial crisis facing many universities. The primary appeal I heard was for the sector to be ‘flexible’ in how it responds. 

Yet, I was struck by the apparent lack of flexibility in our offer and thinking. Despite growing evidence from the 2024 HEPI/Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey and elsewhere of the appeal of more flexible forms of study or the significant revenue potential from lifelong learning, the underpinning assumption remains the same – the inviolability of the degree as the basic unit in higher education. 

Which got me thinking – is this UK higher education’s ‘Kodak Moment’? 

For those who are too young to remember, Kodak cameras were once the market leader in photography and a noted pioneer. They invented the handheld digital camera in the 1970s but, fearing it would cannibalise their existing business, they failed to capitalise on the opportunity. Kodak couldn’t envision a world where photographs could be taken any other way (before the mass appeal of smartphones). The company filed for bankruptcy in 2012 and later reinvented itself as a technology business focused on digital imaging. 

Don’t we see the same fixed mindset in our deference to the degree? Our worldview still revolves around the traditional three-year undergraduate on-campus degree or the one-year taught master’s. We see flexibility in terms of whether it can be accelerated, such as Buckingham’s two-year programmes, or spread out over a longer period, as with part-time study. But flexibility rarely extends beyond a speeding up or slowing down of the way a degree is taken.

I’m not arguing for abandoning degrees. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the traditional three-year degree is popular, not least the decline in part-time learners. There will always be demand for degree programmes, especially among first-time students. And degrees remain the foundation of the rounded higher education experience. They are the most stable and predictable income stream for most universities.

But our narrative so often defaults to the three-year on-campus degree as the basic unit of production that this increasingly feels like a blind spot. Just like Kodak, we know how to ‘make’ degrees and we make them well, but we find it hard to adapt. And this is all the more critical given the increasingly strong evidence that students, lifelong learners, and employers want higher education in smaller chunks. 

There are excellent reasons why this demand for shorter periods of study should be the case. It enables learners to spread the costs and commitment of a full degree over a longer period. They can fit study around their increasingly complex lives. And they can acquire, demonstrate, and apply their learning in a fraction of the time, with near-immediate returns for themselves or their employer. 

Meanwhile, new entrants are moving at pace. Google is a good example: since 2018 over 600,000 have completed a Google certificate. With the rise of skills-based hiring, employers are increasingly looking to microcredentials over full degrees. Professor Martin Bean CBE, who recently joined me to talk about the professional learning landscape, contrasted the degree’s ‘low resolution’ picture of an individual’s skills and capabilities with the ‘high resolution’ equivalent offered by microcredentials and digital passports. 

One of the trends we see in skills-based hiring is the removal of degree requirements from job descriptions. Almost half (45%) of employers surveyed by Hays in its UK 2024 Salary and Recruiting Trends Report said it no longer matters to them whether a job applicant has a degree. 

This need not be terrifying. Higher education can still play a commanding role in this space and arguably should. We can bring quality and robustness, give microcredentials credibility, and critically enhance continuation and progression by enabling learners to stack their study into a fully rounded learning experience for academic credit (the degree). We are better placed to offer applied interdisciplinary study than narrowly focused competitors like Google, and we have the breadth and depth of study options to cater to an individual’s learning needs as they change throughout their working lives. 

But we won’t capitalise on this opportunity if we keep thinking the degree is sacrosanct. To use the tired old adage, right now we ‘sell what we can make’ rather than ‘making what we can sell.’ We need to think about the learning outcomes sought and how best to organise our provision around them, and not assume that the degree is the right vehicle.

Chris Husbands was right to point out that universities are not blessed with this kind of agility. But doing nothing is a choice and it comes at a cost. If we walk into a financial crisis unwilling to question the fundamentals of the existing business model, we may find it destroyed around us. And that will not be good for learners the world over.