That is the big higher education question we should be asking in 2026

By Lucy Gill-Simmen

The UK’s proposed post-16 education and skills policy promises a nation “where nobody is left behind”. The country’s modern industrial strategy 2025 talks of a workforce ready for a decade of growth, green jobs and artificial intelligence. It is the language of momentum and modernity, and reflects a situation faced by educators around the world, including Cyprus.

Education is not merely about producing employable subjects, but cultivating human beings capable of judgement, imagination and democratic participation. Without that moral compass, our forward motion risks becoming little more than acceleration without direction.

In 1949, Albert Einstein lamented: “It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”

More than seven decades later, it feels prophetic. Across higher education in the UK, and possibly elsewhere, a quiet malaise has taken hold. Universities have become fluent in the language of metrics, policies and dashboards, while students have become fluent in anxiety and debt.

US educational reformer John Dewey described education as “life itself”. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire warned that schooling without liberation (meaning active learning rather than passively absorbing information) becomes “the banking of facts”, while the feminist author and academic known as bell hooks viewed education as “the practice of freedom”.

These were not romantic slogans; they were blueprints for survival. These people understood that education is not training – it is a process of becoming. Yet today, the language of learning has been colonised by a language of logistics.

Students are “learners”, teachers “deliverers”, and curiosity has no place in key performance indicators. The university system is increasingly one of transaction and we are building a system that can measure everything except meaning.

The world is moving faster than the curriculum. Recently leaked documents suggest Amazon could replace up to 600,000 workers with robots – a glimpse of a labour market where efficiency outruns employment. If automation can transform one of the world’s largest employers, then the question for higher education is urgent: what are we preparing young people for?

The answer cannot be “the jobs of tomorrow”, because those jobs may not exist. The task now is to educate for adaptability, imagination and moral judgment, the qualities no algorithm can replace. As the historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in 1961: “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.” This is the work before us.

We need not only employable graduates but capable citizens – people able to reason ethically, collaborate across cultures and invent purpose where automation erases routine.

Higher education must recover its voice as the space where society asks its most difficult questions. What is progress for? What is prosperity without dignity? What does it mean to flourish or even to matter in an age of intelligent machines? These are not rhetorical questions – they are the foundation of survival strategies for a civilisation on the cusp of reinvention.

Universities across the world are banging the drum of transformation, insisting that doing things differently is the way forward. But how many are actually doing things differently? For all the rhetoric of innovation, much of the sector remains bound by inherited models of teaching and governance.

Into this inertia steps a new generation of institutions reimagining what a university can be. The “challenger university” model exemplified by Minerva University in the US and the London Interdisciplinary School in the UK, has begun to disrupt long-held assumptions about place, teaching and purpose.

These universities treat the world itself as a campus, fusing digital delivery, experiential learning and global immersion to craft education around curiosity rather than compliance.

Traditional universities are slowly following suit, rolling out accelerated degrees and hybrid formats with experiential learning embedded in their cities. At Royal Holloway Business School, the BSc Business and Management (London Accelerated) London itself becomes the campus as students collaborate with businesses and design projects that connect innovation to ethics. They learn to work with artificial intelligence as a creative partner, not a threat.

This is not a course in survival; it is a course in significance. It teaches that employability follows from imagination, and that imagination begins with purpose. At its heart lies the courage of moral imagination: the willingness to envision not only alternative futures, but better ones.

Higher education stands at a fork in the road. One path leads deeper into optimisation: faster courses, tighter metrics, closer alignment to industry. The other path leads back to truth, curiosity and moral imagination. The first path is safe but soulless. The second is uncertain but alive.

And perhaps that is what this moment demands: to make education full of wonder again.

Lucy Gill-Simmen is Associate Dean (Education & Student Experience) Faculty of Business & Law, Royal Holloway, University of London. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence