WEEKEND READING: Universities aren’t just graduate factories, they’re architects of opportunity
This blog was kindly authored by Professor Gillian Murray, Vice-Chancellor, University of Bradford.
Increasingly, universities are judged not just by the quality of education they provide but by what happens after graduation. This is entirely understandable. Students want confidence that their degrees will lead to meaningful careers, while employers need graduates who are job-ready from day one and who can add value to their businesses. Governments, meanwhile, want to see education translated into productivity, prosperity and economic growth.
But the debate has become dominated by the question of how effectively universities prepare students for the jobs that already exist. Important though that is, it only addresses part of a much wider debate about the value universities create for individuals, employers and society.
My view, grounded in years of experience leading large-scale partnership programmes between universities, industry and government, is that we are looking at this the wrong way round. Universities have a distinctive and under-recognised role as convenors.
Across the UK, higher education institutions are already making profound contributions to their regions and to the national economy. They support entrepreneurs, help businesses innovate, commercialise research, develop new technologies and bring together partners to tackle complex societal challenges.
Yet we rarely talk about these contributions in a coherent way. Employability, research, enterprise, innovation and civic engagement are often treated as separate agendas. In reality, they are deeply interconnected. Together, they form a powerful system for generating opportunity.
Perhaps the greatest strength of a modern university is not simply that it teaches, carries out research and innovates. It is that it convenes. It acts as a conduit through which otherwise disparate partners can connect. No other institution brings together students, researchers, employers, entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers and communities in quite the same way. Universities are uniquely positioned to connect ideas with investment, talent with opportunity and research with real-world application.
This convening power is becoming increasingly important as the economy evolves. Artificial intelligence, demographic change, the transition to net zero and new patterns of work are reshaping labour markets at pace. In such an environment, no curriculum can ever fully keep up. Responding to employer demand will always matter, but it is no longer sufficient.
We must move beyond asking what skills are needed today and begin designing, together, the industries and opportunities of tomorrow. Doing this will require thinking across three horizons and not just focusing on the short term.
The first horizon is preparing students for today’s labour market through excellent education, placements, apprenticeships and close collaboration with employers. This remains fundamental to the mission of every university. It is precisely what we’re doing with Sovereign Health Care, a Bradford partnership that will help alleviate pressure on the NHS and give hundreds of students valuable hands-on experience.
The second horizon is co-designing tomorrow’s workforce. This means bringing together universities, businesses, colleges and government to anticipate emerging skills needs, identify future sectors and develop provision before shortages occur.
The third horizon is creating entirely new forms of opportunity. At Bradford, we are doing with this through our Bradford-Renduchintala Enterprise Ecosystem, which offers anyone (staff, students, members of the public) the chance to gain seed-funding, put business ideas in front of experts and investors, and take those ideas from concept to market. It is through research, innovation and entrepreneurship like this, universities help launch new companies, support the adoption of emerging technologies and attract investment into new areas of growth.
This third horizon, despite often being the least visible, may ultimately be the most transformative. It is here that universities contribute, not only to employment, but to productivity and economic renewal. This is where new industries emerge and where future jobs are created.
For many years, we have been comfortable describing universities in terms of separate missions, teaching, research, innovation, enterprise and civic engagement. The institutions that will flourish in the coming decade will be those that connect these strengths into a single, coherent purpose. That purpose is creating opportunity: for students to build meaningful careers, for businesses to innovate and grow, for researchers to see their work deliver tangible impact, for places to develop and prosper.
But if universities are to act as architects of opportunity, this requires a shift not only in what we do, but in how we think.
It also has clear implications for leadership. The role of a Vice-Chancellor is not only to safeguard academic excellence and institutional sustainability, but to act as a convenor, bringing together partners around shared ambitions and enabling collaboration at scale.
Universities have always brought together people, ideas and possibilities. What has changed is the urgency and the expectation that this results in tangible impact beyond our campuses.
To do this, we need to connect the capabilities we already have more effectively, align them more strategically and articulate their contribution more clearly.
If we can do that, we will move beyond the prevailing narrative that the principal role of universities is to prepare graduates for existing jobs and instead we can begin to help shape the economy those graduates will inherit. In doing so, universities will fulfil one of their most important roles: not simply responding to opportunity but creating it.
Comments
Jonathan Alltimes says:
If the purpose of a university is for creating opportunity and the university is restructured with the power of convening then the argument promises more opportunity. The argument refers to the exemplar of the University of Bradford. The argument relies on four claims:-
1) The purpose of a university is for creating opportunity;
2) A university can be restructured with the power of convening;
3) The power of convening is assumed;
4) The University of Bradford proves the likelihood of the promise for creating opportunity.
Convening causes opportunity through a structure.
1) The original purpose of a university was as a person for legal representation and intergenerational ownership and control of assets, the dead outer bureacratic form.
2) The inner living reality of the academic guild and college both had different purposes: the purpose of the academic guild was to be an autonomous people separate from the state and business, but connected to religious institutions. The purpose of the college was the provision of an independent intergenerational communal place for teaching, learning, and living.
3) The idea of restructuring relies on a false analogy between the exemplar of the University of Bradford and other universities, as Bradford has abandoned the original and traditional purpose, but along with most other universities it has converted to a bureacratic enterprise, whose purpose is delegated profit making. We do not know if other universities are structurally similar to Bradford and can be restructured or their situation.
4) Yes, universities convene but to what purpose? It is not a costless work. The power to convene relied on an assumption that universities had a traditional reputation that they had the monopoly on the capability to know, but how knowledge can be created in other places is not the same as in a university. The universities now convene for profit, when once they convened about their legal and economic matters. The academic guild convened for the truth about freedom and the college convened for the masters and scholars.
5) How would we know if a restructured Bradford has created opportunity? There is no way of testing the historical alternative. The examples given about Bradford assume that is what creating opportunity means, within the bureacratic enterprise opportunity must mean for profit.
To improve the (economic) effects of a university, it is the other sides of the institutional structure which require restructuring, that is, business, government, charity, and public services. But each has a different purpose. What is lacking in Bradford is private investment at scale, Bradford has many exporting SMEs with low productivity, but do you know the 20 largest employers by number of employees and turnover?
You see, a university is not a building it is a people.
Reply
Ronald Barnett says:
I like the concept of convening. (By the way, the concept of brokering may be even more potent.)
However, the connotation of ‘convening’ here is disappointingly narrow. Here again we have a HEPI blog with lots of reference to skills, employability, the economy, innovation, business, entrepreneurship, industry and growth but NO mention of education, culture, critical thinking, worldly crises, personal anxiety and resilience, ‘being’ in an age of imposition and not even any serious recognition as to what it is to be a ‘student’ in the twenty-first century.
This set of silences is, I fear, now all too frequent in the contemporary ‘debate’ in UK higher education and is a matter on which I have been commenting for some time.
Ron B
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