What is a university actually for?

‘Universities are expected to deliver measurable results: faster degrees, more graduates, and research with economic outcomes,’ writes Yeşim Topuz. ‘The question of what the value of education is gets lost.’

Lately, education has been talked about in terms of what it produces rather than what it is or does to us. For example in the 2024 OECD PISA reports, which frame declining test scores primarily as a threat to future GDP and national productivity. The conversation keeps going back and forth between jobs, innovation, and economic value. And, amidst all this, the question of what the value of education in itself is gets lost.

Just last month, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that ‘research is not an end in itself. Research must lead to value creation, production and innovation in Germany and Europe.’ The idea that education and research must be useful has become so ingrained that we rarely notice it.

Even though education serves multiple purposes, such as personal development or civic socialization, the focus lies on the economic one. Universities are expected to deliver measurable results: faster degrees, more graduates, and research with economic outcomes. Funding is more and more tied to these criteria, silently redefining what knowledge counts as valuable. So, when resources are limited, that priority tends to go to fields and projects that promise clear returns.

According to the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2024, 1.17Billion dollars had been allocated to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics); meanwhile, it was ‘only’ 207 Million dollars for the Humanities. The gap in funding between STEM and the humanities is the consequence of a deliberate and global shift toward utilitarianism in education and research. It is almost like, if something isn’t measurable, it didn’t happen.

Further debates about budget cuts in Dutch higher education only reinforce this direction. Even when cuts are partially reversed, the broader logic stays intact: universities are expected to do more with less, and to show their value in concrete numbers.

All of this could be seen as the consequence of what is called the neoliberal turn in higher education. Since the 1980s, with political figures like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, universities have been gradually reframed as economic actors. Under Thatcher, universities faced major funding cuts that forced them to rethink how they justified their existence.

Up until then, British universities were mostly funded through bodies like the University Grants Committee (UGC), which acted as a buffer between government and academia, to protect them as spaces of knowledge. Funding was distributed in a way that aimed to preserve academic standards, rather than force institutions to compete or justify themselves in economic terms. But slowly, the ability to compete in the market and output goals have replaced models of the greater societal good.

Nonetheless, if this way of thinking had a beginning, it is not inevitable. Universities were not always organised around efficiency and output. Firstly, they were spaces where knowledge could exist without an immediate economic purpose. A place where education was, at least in part, an end in itself. Don’t we want universities to be such places in our time?

_Advertentie.