WEEKEND READING: Universities do not lack opportunity. They lose it in the flow

This blog was kindly authored by Dr John Milliken, a retired academic from Queen’s University Belfast, University of Ulster & the Open University.

Universities are frequently criticised for failing to prepare students adequately for employment, respond quickly enough to employers or contribute visibly enough to regional growth. The usual response is to call for more partnerships, more placements, more employer engagement, more entrepreneurship and more civic activity.

Yet many universities already undertake all these things.

The deeper problem is not necessarily the absence of activity. It is the failure to connect activity into a coherent process.

Universities generate knowledge, educate students, undertake research, work with employers, support innovation, engage with communities and maintain relationships with graduates. But these functions are often organised as separate institutional territories. Careers teams gather employer intelligence that may never reach programme designers. Researchers develop knowledge that may not reach local businesses. Alumni accumulate decades of professional experience but remain largely disconnected from current students. Employers contribute to advisory panels without seeing whether their advice influences decisions. Students complete placements, projects and dissertations whose learning is rarely captured systematically by the institution.

The university is therefore busy, but not always flowing. This distinction matters. Activity can be counted. Flow must be traced.

A flow-based university would examine how opportunity moves through the institution:

Observation → Information → Interpretation → Decision → Action → Outcome → Learning

The process begins with observation. Universities must remain attentive to changes in employment, technology, communities, professions and society. Signals may emerge from employers, students, graduates, professional bodies, research, public services or local communities.

Observation alone, however, achieves little. What is noticed must become information. That information must be gathered, tested and shared rather than remaining within one department, committee or professional service.

Information must then be interpreted. A shortage of particular skills, for example, may not require a new degree programme. It may require changes to existing modules, short professional courses, workplace learning, conversion provision or collaboration with further education. Interpretation prevents institutions from responding to every external demand with the same familiar solution.

Interpretation must lead to decision. This is often where flow slows or stops. Universities are highly capable of establishing working groups, consultation exercises and steering committees. They are sometimes less effective at identifying who has the authority to decide, what evidence is required and when action should begin.

Decision must then become action. Curriculum changes must reach students. Research partnerships must generate application. Employer engagement must produce meaningful experience rather than ceremonial association. Enterprise support must help ideas progress beyond competitions, presentations and photographs.

Action must produce an outcome that can be examined. Did students gain stronger employment prospects? Did an employer solve a genuine problem? Did a new course meet an identified need? Did research improve practice? Did a community receive lasting benefit?

Finally, outcomes must generate learning. Without this final stage, institutions repeatedly launch initiatives without accumulating institutional wisdom. Successful projects remain isolated, while failed projects quietly disappear and are later reinvented under new names.

This is why universities do not always need more initiatives. They need greater integrity in the movement between existing ones.

The student journey is also a flow process

The same principle applies to students. The student journey is often presented as a sequence beginning with recruitment and ending with graduation. This creates an artificial boundary. Graduation should not be regarded as the completion of the university’s interest in a student, but as a transition into another stage of development.

Students enter university with prior knowledge, employment, family responsibilities, cultural experience and personal capabilities. These should flow into the learning process rather than being treated as irrelevant background. During study, academic knowledge should flow into application through placements, projects, simulation, enterprise and workplace learning. Experience gained outside the classroom should then flow back into reflection, discussion and assessment.

After graduation, professional experience should continue to flow back into the university. Graduates can become mentors, guest contributors, placement providers, research partners and sources of intelligence about changing workplaces. They should not simply be recorded as employment outcomes and contacted when the institution requires donations.

A healthy university relationship is cyclical rather than terminal.

Experience must move in both directions

Universities also need to reconsider the movement of professional experience. Too often, the relationship between higher education and employment is imagined as a one-way process: universities prepare students and employers receive them. In reality, knowledge should travel in both directions.

Practitioners should contribute to teaching. Academic staff should remain connected to professional practice. Employers should help identify emerging needs. Students should bring current workplace problems into learning. Researchers should translate findings into forms that practitioners can use. Retired professionals and academics should not disappear from the system when they leave formal employment; they represent an enormous reserve of experience, judgment and institutional memory.

The question is not simply whether these people are connected to the university. It is whether their knowledge can move to where it is needed.

Universities often possess more expertise than they recognise because it is held in separate departments, professional services, partnerships, alumni communities and individual careers. Flow makes that expertise visible and usable.

Partnership without flow is largely ceremonial

The language of partnership is now embedded throughout higher education. Universities partner with employers, colleges, schools, public services, local authorities and community organisations.

But the existence of a partnership does not demonstrate its value. A partnership should be judged by what passes through it. Does information move? Are problems jointly interpreted? Are decisions changed? Are resources committed? Does action occur? Are outcomes evaluated? Does learning return to all participants?

Where these stages are absent, partnership can become ceremonial. Meetings are held, agreements are signed and newsletters are produced, but the underlying systems remain unchanged. A flow approach would therefore replace the question, “Who are our partners?” with a more demanding one:What moves between us, where does it go and what changes as a result?

Leadership must protect the whole pathway

Universities are traditionally organised through faculties, schools, departments and professional services. These structures provide expertise, accountability and identity. They should not simply be swept away in the name of integration. But every structure creates boundaries, and every boundary creates the possibility that information or responsibility will stop.

Leadership must therefore protect the integrity of the whole pathway. This means identifying where flow breaks down between observation and information, between evidence and decision, between decision and action, or between outcome and learning.

It also means rewarding contribution across boundaries. A member of staff who connects students with employers, translates research into practice or brings professional knowledge into the curriculum may create substantial value without fitting neatly into conventional measures of teaching or research performance.

The flow university would recognise the people who carry ideas across the institution, not only those who generate them within a particular part of it.

From institutional activity to institutional movement

The future of higher education will not be secured merely by adding more programmes, strategies, partnerships or committees. Universities already contain remarkable concentrations of knowledge, talent and possibility. Their challenge is to make these resources move.

A university creates opportunity when observation becomes information, information becomes understanding, understanding becomes decision, decision becomes action, action creates value and experience improves what happens next.

Where that flow is intact, teaching, research, enterprise and civic engagement reinforce one another. Where it is broken, opportunity is not necessarily absent. It is simply lost somewhere inside the institution.

Universities do not need to behave like graduate factories. Nor should they define themselves through a collection of separate missions. They should become integrated systems through which knowledge, experience and opportunity can flow.