Higher education has been rooted in tradition for decades—if not centuries—making it difficult to adapt to a modern landscape. But change is required to meet the learners of today and set them up for success in a competitive job market. In this interview, Jim Gazzard highlights the key enrollment challenges in the UK, the strategies to move toward serving modern learners and the role CE plays.
The EvoLLLution (Evo): What are some key enrollment challenges you’re seeing in the UK?
Jim Gazzard (JG): Along with the rest of the world, there are challenges around the demographic and market trends associated with standard age students. Institutions are consequently looking at opportunities with students across all life stages, but it’s crucial to consider how to engage with these more diverse groups. Adult students are often much clearer about what they want from learning, so it’s important to consider where your offer fits into the marketplace and whether it is set out in compelling ways.
Institutions such as universities were seen as highly trusted entities with a value proposition that was understood. Now we’re seeing some political concerns, and some strands of the media are questioning the value of higher education. So, we need to be sharper in articulating the value of what we deliver. University education is not only training and developing specific skills. Crucially, it is about critical thinking. If changes in technology happen, our students will be able to react to them because we’ve not trained them one dimensionally. Instead, they should be able to deal with the new and the unfamiliar.
Evo: What are some strategies and processes to address these challenges and start moving the institution toward serving these learners?
JG: We’ve been serving adult student audiences for over 150 years. We have a wide curriculum offer, and it’s important to ensure the existing curricula are clearly packaged and labelled so learners can appraise their merits. We can also use existing materials and package them in different ways to ensure they respond to need. Further, institutions must work more closely with employers, so we can better understand the needs of their workforces and the challenges they face.
In the UK, quite a complex environment has grown up around adult skills, and it may involve national bodies that set the agenda, professional accrediting bodies, regional actors such as metro mayors who control funding. Sometimes these agendas are aligned and sometimes they pull in different directions. We need to do more to engage with the relevant groups to understand their aims and be confident in adding value as experts in adult learning.
Another thing we need to focus on more is the impact of education and training for adults. Longitudinal studies are not easy, yet near-term feedback often provides limited insight into how learning is enacted. We need to develop better ways to build meaningful relationships with adults and their employers over a longer period of time. And we need to use their stories and meaningful metrics to understand what works and how it is evolving as learning needs change.
Evo: What role does student experience play in attracting and retaining students?
JG: Student experience is a really interesting term that has arguably been overly focused on what pre-experience younger students studying on a full-time basis value most. Instead, we must understand what a student experience means for adult learners, often taking short courses or part-time qualifications. Oftentimes, older learners may not see themselves as a student in the same way. But they are acutely aware whether their student experience is helping them become more confident, access employment, accelerate their career or navigate a major life change.
What’s important is to see the student experience as focused on effectiveness and efficiency. Adults are often time-poor, and we need to ensure we are maximizing the time they are investing. This time is often used best if they feel part of a learning community, learning alongside peers. When there’s connection and interaction in a classroom, that’s rocket fuel. We sometimes think too much about individual learning outcomes rather than learning as collective groups. We know that adults will often reflect on the networks they form during lifelong learning as having significant value.
Evo: Where does CE sit at the University of Cambridge? What role does it play within the broader institution when it comes to enrollment and student engagement?
JG: We function as Cambridge’s open university. Our continuing education unit isn’t within a school or a faculty. We work across all six of the university’s schools and with many of the 31 colleges in Cambridge. We curate and form learning that draws on the research and teaching that goes on across Cambridge. We can augment that with tutors from industry, healthcare, third sector or government.
We have our own admissions and enrollment team, and our advisors can engage with prospective learners on their terms. Some of our learners talk about imposter syndrome, so we start forming a positive and enabling learning relationship at the admissions phase, irrespective of the learner’s experience. As humans, we all have different levels of confidence and self-efficacy, and its our job to do all we can to remove self-imposed barriers to learning and build optimistically on adult learners’ life experiences and existing knowledge and skills. It’s important to talk at the admissions phase about how we work across the university and the opportunities we can create for adults studying part time at Cambridge.
Our job is to coalesce that learning environment into something that works for everybody. We’re incredibly fortunate at Cambridge to have a lot of agency and freedom to shape a purpose-built offer for adults. We’re more interested in where learners are going than cataloging what they’ve done before. We must focus on the power of opportunity and where people can go using their knowledge, skills, information and networks. And that’s the key to it all.
Evo: How can CE help the university build tighter relationships with local employers and industry to make sure curricula are aligned with their needs?
JG: So much of this is how you’d build any professional enduring relationship. It’s about understanding the direction of travel in which an organization is heading. Sometimes employers speak about very specific training needs, which is a relatively easy starting point to build that relationship and demonstrate the efficacy of that relationship. But much more now employers are talking about deeper and existential matters: how they can recruit and retain their workforce and how to keep people within their value chain to benefit from the expertise they’ve developed. More conversations are about generating a culture of learning and development and a workplace that truly values and rewards learning.
Often the challenges of making money today—ensuring that company is stable right now—outweighs developing for tomorrow. So, when we’re talking about industry, is there a way we can deliver education and training that can be taken back to the job today but scaffold into the skills and knowledge of tomorrow? It requires frameworks where individuals and teams can really document and articulate their progress and also plan their future educational needs.
Evo: What advice do you have for other higher ed leaders looking to better serve their learners and address this enrollment gap?
JG: The future requires collaboration and coordination among continuing education providers—whether that’s universities, community colleges or private providers. None of us can do everything brilliantly. We need to talk together more about articulating what pathways in learning could be between providers. One of the things employers and employees often tell us is they don’t know what’s out there. It’s really confusing because we’ve created an environment that is not easy to navigate. So, we need to be better at providing information, advice and guidance to use the formal term but also strip away things that don’t work and get in the way. From a provider sense, we can work better together.
We also don’t undertake enough scholarship on the impact of the learning and teaching we do. We need more evidence about what’s working and what’s not. We’re certainly seeing changes in the way learners behave. Everything in life is now on-demand, bite-sized and often interactive. Trying to ask a student to concentrate for 50 minutes or an hour in a didactic class environment is difficult. We need to think about how to get quality outcomes and take different approaches with learners to get to the outcomes they need. We must keep innovating.
The University of Cambridge is in its 151st year, and we must continue to validate lifelong learning for adults, communities, employers and funders. It is a process of renewal, upskilling, reskilling, thinking in different ways, changing attitudes, enabling respectful disagreement, recognizing aspects that bind us together—using learning to bring people together in a complex world. We must make people comfortable as lifelong learners. It comes down to listening to what adults want to achieve and then seeing how best to enhance our provision as continuing educators.
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