SHF2019丨Michael Spence:Education for a Changing World: Universities and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

ChairpersonJiaoyang, President Xu,

        It is a remarkable privilege to be here.And I'm going to, if I may, now turn the access in a number of ways.

The first is we've been thinking at the grand scale about therelationship between countries, about geopolitical shifts, and they areobviously important as we think about a period of global uncertainty, but theyare not the only source of uncertainty at the moment, and in particular not theonly source of uncertainty that is affecting both the work of universities andalso the future of work itself. So in one sense, I'd like to both change thescale of our conversation to think about the role of educators in a changingworld, and to change the focus of our attention, from geopolitical attentions,to the changes to the world of work that re going to be brought about by theartificial intelligence revolution, because universities are going to becrucial to finding a way through our current eleventh, and universities aregoing to be crucial both as building people-to-people bridges between countriesand bridges of knowledge, of understanding, of research and of education. It'sa tremendous privilege to be here with a large delegation from the Universityof Sydney to sign what will be the most significant investment so far in theChina relationship with Fudan University in the area of artificial intelligenceand brain sciences.

The scholars differ about the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolutionon the future of work, the future shape of the labor market, but all agree thatchanges are happening and that the pace of change will only increase. And someestimates as many as 40 percent of current jobs will be replaced by computersin 10 to 15 years, and no one doubts that the students currently at Fudan,currently at the University of Sydney, will need to be ready for several careerchanges during their lives, and changes that will require changes of wholecareers, not just of jobs or roles. Much attention has been focused on the roleof university research, but I think it's also important not only to think aboutresearch and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but also the role of theuniversity as the center of education. And it's in that area of the role of theuniversity as the center of education, as the places in which these futureleaders that will help us navigate the uncertainties of the current time areproduced, that we need to think. The technological revolutions of the past havemostly left the roles for which university education is required untouched, butnot so of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The work of lawyers, ofaccountants, of doctors, of many professionals will be radically changed. As arecent report by the Reuters put it, today being educated increasingly meanshaving attitudes and behaviors that enable one to adapt quickly to changedcircumstances. President Xi made a similar point earlier this week when hespoke of the need for resilience. The question facing all universities is howwe produce graduates who are going to be the people telling the machines whatto do, and not just people whose jobs are replaced by the machines. And I thinkfor every university, that requires essentially two areas of self-examinationand reform, areas that we've been giving considerable attention to at theUniversity of Sydney, and if you'll excuse me, I'll use my own university as acase study. In addition, the changing face of technology poses importantquestions for education policy-makers, one of which I'd like to touch onbriefly at the conclusion of my remarks.

        First, there's no doubt thatuniversities have to closely examine both our undergraduate curricular and theextracurricular experience that we offer, to determine how future-proof theymay be. The University of Sydney has just massively reformed our undergraduatecurriculum, with the Fourth Industrial Revolution in mind, a process thatinvolved extensive international consultation with experts, with employersthroughout the region, with students and with our community more generally. Webegan with a blank sheet of paper, by asking exactly what personal andintellectual qualities a student will need in order to have the adaptability torespond to rapidly changing world of work. We have designed a new undergraduatecurriculum intended to live up to these core attributes. As a result, all ourundergraduate degrees are now marked by three key features. The first of theseis a balance between deep disciplinary expertise and interdisciplinaryeffectiveness. In English-speaking world of course, models of undergraduateeducation are being spread on the spectrum between the poles of the Englishmodel with its single area of focus and the very broad American undergraduateliberal arts education. Having taught in those systems, I can say with someconfidence that a traditional English undergraduate education teaches youeverything about almost nothing, and a traditional American undergraduateeducation teaches you nothing about almost everything. But it's generallyagreed that the education that can survive the Fourth Industrial Revolutionmust be T-shaped. It must both be broad and genuinely deep in a particulardisciplinary area. Depth is required because it's been repeatedly demonstratedto be the most effective way of teaching critical thinking skills that will beessential to the adaption to change, and also effective skills in written andoral communication. Still students need to acquire a habit of mind that pushesbeyond the superficial, into the complexities of a given issue or given area oflearning. But the questions of the modern world, questions such as how to dealwith climate change, with global shifts in the political balance of power, inequality and alike, are essentially multi-disciplinary in their formation. Andkey to an effective graduate career is the ability to work inmulti-disciplinary teams, and to learn quickly the language and intellectualframing of disciplines that are not one's own. In Sydney we have addressed thisissue in a number of ways. First, we have strengthened the rigour of ourdisciplinary education going back to the future to ensure that every studenthas a very deep grounding in a particular area of learning. Second, we haveintroduced the requirement that students take some units of study that areavailable across the university, units that either focus on amulti-disciplinary problem, or introduce students to methodologies that are newto them. But third, and most radically, we've made it possible for students,indeed we've encouraged them, to take a second major, to take two majors, andto take them from anywhere in the university, whatever their primary major maybe. Students are putting together really unusual combinations of subjects, andthey are doing that in two deep areas. They are doing that always with somefuture-oriented justification in mind.

The second key feature of the undergraduate education that wethink you'll need to survive the Fourth Industrial Revolution is caused by thefact that it's not only technological change that our students will be facedwith. The world is increasingly interconnected, no matter how strongly at themoment many politicians may be working to push us apart, the world isincreasingly interconnected and increasingly a culturally complex place. Rapidchanges in technology and the resulting uncertainty that many will feel intheir work and in their futures will only increase the need for bettercross-cultural understanding. Business, civil society and government leaders ofthe kind that universities traditionally produced will increasingly need theability to reach out beyond their own cultural frames. For that reason, we'vemade the development of cross-cultural competence a key goal of ourundergraduate education. 40% of our Australian students already speak alanguage other than English at home. But we've made it possible for everyone toacquire an additional language as a part of their degree whatever they arestudying. In addition, we've already got more Australian students studyingoverseas as a part of their degree than any other Australian university andChina is their destination of choice, and we also hit our strategic target of at least one in two domesticstudents spending a significant amount of time overseas. And finally, wethought deeply about the internalization of our curriculum and the way in whichcultural competence can be developed in the classroom.

But it's the third new structural feature of our undergraduatedegrees that we think is relatively distinctive at the scale at which we aredoing it. Remember we are a university of almost 70, 000 students that teachesalmost everything, and all students are required to undertake an extended real-worldproblem-solving experience. In this context, we work with companies and civilsociety organizations across Australia, China, India, the United Kingdom andEurope, and ask them to identify a real strategic problem on which they areactually working. It can't be devised for the process. It can't be somethingthat's made up. And then they need to work with groups of our students andacademics in multi-disciplinary teams to find solutions to the problems. Thestudents need to demonstrate in devising the solution the way in which theirown discipline makes a contribution to its solution, but also theireffectiveness as part of working in a multidisciplinary team. That experiencefor many of our students brings together all that they've been learning in theirdiscipline, in multi-disciplinary learning and in cross-cultural effectiveness.It prepares them for a world of change, in which the problems that they'll needto solve don't come with any boundaries, and in which interpersonaleffectiveness is as important as their core intellectual and professionalskills. The feedback so far from the organizations with whom we've workedacross the world, many of whom end up adopting one of the solutions devised byour students and from the students has been outstanding. We've also found amuch more satisfactory approach that embedded learning, internships and alikebecause of the incredible variation in the quality of experience that studentscan have in placements and internships.

Complementary to those three structural features of ourundergraduate curriculum, we are working hard to ensure that our own campusexperience delivers us the personal attributes that are necessary forleadership in the future. This is something that I know many Chineseuniversities are currently grappling with. Contrary to some of the predictionswithin the digital world that the on-campus experience will disappear, webelieve that it's face-to-face interaction, but particularly the ability toleverage the social, capital and networks of the university, that's going to bemore and more important for people in the crucial post-secondary phase. It'salso in extracurricular activities that students often acquire many of theso-called “soft skills” in interpersonal effectiveness that artificialintelligence will never be able to replace. Moreover, employment rates forthree-year undergraduates in Australia are declining. Employers tell us thatthat's because they increasingly believe that it takes four years to mature apost-secondary student to the point in which they are effective in a modernworkplace. Arguably, that will only be truer as uncertainty in the world ofwork grows. Much of that maturation happens in the extracurricular space.

So that's how we approach the issue of undergraduate education forthe Fourth Industrial Revolution. In a way, it's been really gratifying to hearemployers talk about the value of much of what universities have traditionallydo, but also to challenges, to think about some new things. Universities allover the world are experimenting, with ways of preparing people for uncertainfuture of leadership, but this T-shaped education, cross-culturaleffectiveness, the ability to bring learning to real-world problem solvings arekey to all the solutions that have been experimented with at the moment.

The second challenge created for the educational mission ofuniversities by the Fourth Industrial Revolution is of course in the area ofpost-graduate learning and lifelong learning. As the market for post-graduatetaught courses declines everywhere, universities need to examine the questionof how actively they are going to engage in what is increasingly called“The 60 Year Curriculum”. As professor Gary Matkin fromUC Irvine said, the insight of the heart of “The 60 Year Curriculum” is that asthe consequence of AI and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, educational needsare going to more than ever extend beyond the whole of the career and emerge atdifferent points of the career, as work evolves and sometimes radicallychanges. The question arises that as jobs come and go and careers developthrough a lifetime, it's how to ensure that workers have education that theyneed at the time at which they needed—both technical education and furtherdevelopment of the soft skills—that are going to be so important. The relativeresponsibilities of education providers of individuals and of employers totrain and retrain them as their careers are developing is increasingly beingrenegotiated in different ways and in different systems. Moreover, it's notonly a question for the future. Many in our current employment will, withintheir working lives, see not only their jobs but their professions disappear,and face the need for significant retraining. One thing that's clear is thatthe traditional postgraduate model of retraining through subsequent degrees anddiplomas is proving too inflexible and too costly to respond to the developingneeds of the labor force. We have postgraduate or taught postgraduate courses,such as MBAs, that remain popular, but they do so often as a kind of finishingschool, a sort of pre-experience education, rounding out an undergraduateeducation rather than a subsequent qualification. One approach that offerspartnership with private online providers has been todevelop online taught postgraduate courses of one kind or another, and mostuniversities such as my own have significant examples of such courses. Thereremains a significant investment of time and effort on the part of students whooften face strong demands on their time and energy, and that raises thequestion of the role of the university in micro-credentialing, quite literally,providing credentials for smaller or more specific attainment levels, sometimesstand-alone, and sometimes able to be built up as models of a more substantialqualification. For every university, the question is going to emerge as to itsflexibility, and to its willingness to enter into this new market. Of course,the so-called MOOCs (the massive online open courses) that have emerged in thelast decade, have been a wide-scale experiment in this space, and we have manyjust like everybody else. Almost every university has put its toe into thiskind of activity. But the stakes for universities have been relatively low, andfor most, MOOC courses amount a little more than brand-enhancing tasters oftheir more mainstream educational offerings. Moreover, while most universitiesoffer extension education and professional development courses, theseactivities are only exceptional cases at scale. Systematically to enter themicro-credentialing market would be, for most institutions, a much moresignificant commitment. Operating in this sphere effectively requires quitedifferent skills of a cultural and academic staff than of traditionally beingfounding research universities. And it's no small question to how heavily auniversity wants to invest in this area. On the other hand, given the scale ofthe predicted demand of the Fourth Industrial Revolution will create, thefinancial returns from this type of activity are potentially significant. Oneinteresting question is how much this is a new market or how much, for example,like the National University of Singapore, you may see it as a way of enhancingyour primary market by making courses open only to alumni.

But finally, it's not only that universities are needing torethink undergraduate education, and also postgraduate education andmicro-credentialing, “The 60 Year Curriculum”, but the whole post-secondarysector faces an enormous challenge because of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,and very few governments are responding to this challenge. This is a challengeprimarily not for individual universities, but for the system as a whole. Thetraditional distinction between university and vocational education has assumeda certain division of labor, and at least in the West, a certain traditionalclass structure between, for example, the design engineer and the mechanic. Butthose distinctions are already incredibly blurred. And increasingly the Fourth IndustrialRevolution will require highly technically-skilled workers who do not necessarilyneed the full suite of graduate attributes that ought to be developed in auniversity degree. The major technology companies internationally arecomplaining that the traditional distinction between the engineering and themechanic is no longer sufficiently nuanced, and that there's a skill basebetween those two that will be increasingly required and that is lacking inmany advanced economies. The German and Singaporean systems with theirtechnical universities have given considerable thought to that labor marketchallenge and the Singaporeans are of course at the moment of investing heavilyin it. But I'd argue that in many other jurisdictions, such as my own, and Iwould say to China, have yet to think wholisticly about the post-secondaryexperience. Governments have a key role to play in building an educationalsystem that services the needs of the labor force throughout the whole of thelives of workers and across the spectrum of the skills that will be required.

（This article is edited based on therecording and has not been reviewed by the speaker.）