Morning all. Today, HESA is releasing The World of Higher Education – Year in Review 2025, the first in our to-be-annual series chronicling how the world’s higher education systems have fared over the past twelve months. You can download it here.
Despite taking up something on the order of 1% of global GDP and educating 3-4% of the world’s population in any given year, higher education is, perhaps surprisingly, a field where most of the analytical work is resoundingly national in focus. The purpose of this publication is to try to provide a genuinely global and transnational way of thinking about our ever-changing sector.
It’s composed of four main sections: The Year’s Stories, which contains concise summaries of how specific policy files played out around the world. Then comes a series of National Summaries which each provide a small précis of news and statistical analysis from twenty-five countries which collectively make up nearly 80% of global higher education. The third section is The World of Higher Education in Data, which provides an overall statistical portrait of trends in global higher education participation and finance going back to 2006. Then there is a section on Strategic Plans in 2025, which focuses on the changing aims and ambitions of global top 200 universities. And in addition to all that, we have smaller pieces on higher education books of the year, the best campus architecture of 2025, and spotlights on three countries which are taking some very big and exciting steps to improve their higher education systems.
And what exactly did we learn from all of this? How can one best summarize the position of higher education globally?
Well, look, it’s not good. 2025 was a year of monsters. Four of them, to be specific.
The most obvious monster was President Donald Trump and the fascist troupe that accompanied him to occupy Washington, DC in January. Upon arrival, Trump and his allies in both federal and state governments began a ferocious series of attacks on international students, academic freedom, disciplines (history, in particular), institutions, and science itself, whose full effect may take years to understand and decades to reverse. The spectacle of the American government immolating one of the country’s greatest resources left the world staring in appalled fascination: we have genuinely seen nothing like this since the 1930s. The American saga is genuinely the story of the year – probably the decade – in higher education.
But there were other monsters, too: the principal one being neglect. What seems to unite most of the developed world right now is an assumption that institutions run on autopilot and do not need attention because they will always exist and always provide services. In that sense, what is happening to higher education institutions is a bit like what is happening to democracies themselves: the foundations are in need of repair, but the expense and effort to do so are seemingly beyond the imagination of governments.
Some of the current neglect is for good reason. Since 2022, if not earlier, the world has returned to a much more dangerous, cold war-like state. This is justifiably taking up much of the attention of national decision-makers. So, too, is climate change in all its many manifestations. In many parts of the world, the costs of supporting an aging population provides competition for public dollars, and in some countries, the debt burden from COVID-19 and/or many years of public profligacy has shrunk the funds available to support all public expenditures, not just higher education. In country after country, what we see is not just a pattern of stagnant investment, but one where politicians either actively blame universities for their own parlous condition or they simply shrug and tell them to “work with austerity”. Few outside the sector seem to care very much. Universities feel alone.
The third monster in much of the world is stagnant or declining enrolment. In this volume – which tries to cover the 25 largest higher education systems in the world – what we see is that in almost half of these countries, enrolment is stagnant or falling. In most places this is due to demographic changes, but in a few countries – especially Türkiye and Pakistan – it seems to be the result of an overbuilt higher education system that students and/or governments can no longer afford to support in their present state and/or rate of return.
Which brings us to the final monster, which is that of technological change and the spectre of technological obsolescence. Strictly speaking, this is not a new issue: universities are always grappling with technological change and how to structure their offerings to meet them. This current wave, though, seems somewhat different, primarily because the technology itself (artificial intelligence) seems simultaneously world-changing and not-yet-ready-for-prime-time, and because its arrival has coincided with a global economic slowdown that is itself creating problems in the labour market. Students and their parents are worried about their futures and are demanding greater certainty of payoff for the time and money spent in higher education – as indeed are many governments. Much will be resolved as new technologies inch towards maturity but, in the meantime, the challenge of dealing with new technologies is contributing to a sense of fragility in the sector.
It is important to remember, however, that while the four monsters of fascism, neglect, demography, and technological change are all global in scope, their impact is decidedly variable across countries. In particular, the phenomenon of neglect is not universal; many countries still believe in higher education as a means of modernization and are pouring money into the sector in order to speed up economic and social development. Türkiye and South Korea are pouring money into their universities despite declining student numbers. China is justly proud of the huge strides its top institutions have taken over the past two decades. India’s public investment in higher education may have stalled, but private institutions are proliferating, and a few are gaining prestige as centres of research. Brazil has turned to the private sector and to online education to swell its student numbers over the 10-million mark. Across the Arab world, there are many instances of growing enrolment and policy innovation. There are, in short, places that see higher education as a solution, not a problem.
However, even in such countries, signs of decay are evident. Belief in higher education might be an antidote to neglect, but it cannot stave off the effects of demography. Pride in higher education achievements in India and China are not translating into greater financial support for the sector. Growth in African higher education is significantly lower than was predicted just a few years ago, and even in places where it is not (e.g. Kenya), governments have difficulty keeping up financially with demand. In the short-term, that creates financial challenges for institutions that are every bit as challenging as those plaguing rich-world countries such as Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom – perhaps even more so.
Global higher education will survive all of this. It always does. But while the necessity of structural changes in the university models of finance and program delivery seem ever more urgent, academia’s innate conservatism, inertia, and justifiable pride in past achievements makes rapid change difficult. Higher education systems are fracturing under the various pressures being put on them. Nothing has cracked yet, but in some parts of the world, we seem to be getting very close to a reckoning. 2026 will be very interesting.
Many thanks to the team at HESA for helping put this together, but especially Alex Petit-Thorne and Samantha Pufek, who have gone well above the call of duty to help put this into the world. And thanks to all of you for reading it. We’re keen to hear what you like most and least about Year in Review, and also any of your suggestions for future issues. Just send us a note at YIR@higheredstrategy.com.
And we’ll see you back here again in a year’s time.
