Higher Education in the Era of Knowledge Economy

Abstract

The concept of knowledge economy goes back to the 1960s but received renewed attention in the 1990s when first global metrics attempted to quantify the advent of the knowledge economy. These metrics focused on various inputs and their effect on the rate of economic growth. From this perspective, higher education (HEd) provided major inputs to the growth of the knowledge economy in the form of skilled human resources and research products as measured by research publications, citations, and patents. This view on the role of HEd in the knowledge economy dominates to date despite the United Nations index of human development that focused on progress in education, safety, health, ecology, and human rights. Since the rise of the neoliberal regime in the 1980s, an increasing emphasis on economic growth and efficiency reoriented HEd and the academic profession to that end. Economic innovation indicators suggest that there are multiple pathways for sustained economic growth for nations of varying resources and development stages. The academic profession has a responsibility to determine how to educate knowledge workers, how to shape the research agenda and promote the public value of knowledge, and how to connect the national and global economy with the responsibility to social demand—such as through the model of the service university—with the ultimate goal of advancing the human condition.