The big higher education question in 2026 ought to be: what are we preparing young people for?

The UK’s proposed post-16 education and skills policy promises a nation “where nobody is left behind”. The country’s modern industrial strategy 2025 talks of a workforce ready for a decade of growth, green jobs and artificial intelligence. It is the language of momentum and modernity, but beneath the optimism of these papers and policies lies unease.

We have a plan for skills, but do we still have a philosophy of education? The refrain that “nobody gets left behind” only holds meaning if we first know where we are going.

Education is not merely about producing employable subjects, but cultivating human beings capable of judgement, imagination and democratic participation. Without that moral compass, our forward motion risks becoming little more than acceleration without direction.

In 1949, Albert Einstein lamented: “It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”

More than seven decades later, it feels prophetic. Across higher education in the UK, a quiet malaise has taken hold. Universities have become fluent in the language of metrics, policies and dashboards, while students have become fluent in anxiety and debt.

We speak earnestly of agility and alignment, yet without clear direction. Once the moral and intellectual conscience of society, the British university risks becoming something far more ordinary: an institution of conformity, competing for the same diminishing pool of students and, in doing so, becoming indistinguishable from its peers.

This creeping homogenisation reflects the global commercialisation of higher education, where institutions mirror market logics (such as supply and demand) rather than challenge them, often at the expense of curiosity, critical thinking and imagination.

US educational reformer John Dewey described education as “life itself”. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire warned that schooling without liberation (meaning here agency and active learning rather than passively absorbing information) becomes “the banking of facts”, while the feminist author and academic known as bell hooks viewed education as “the practice of freedom”.

These were not romantic slogans; they were blueprints for survival. These people understood that education is not training – it is a process of becoming. Yet today, the language of learning has been colonised by a language of logistics.

Students are “learners”, teachers “deliverers”, and curiosity has no place in key performance indicators. The university system is increasingly one of transaction and we are building a system that can measure everything except meaning.

Opportunity in a crisis

The world is moving faster than the curriculum. Recently leaked documents suggest Amazon could replace up to 600,000 workers with robots – a glimpse of a labour market where efficiency outruns employment. If automation can transform one of the world’s largest employers, then the question for higher education is urgent: what are we preparing young people for?

The answer cannot be “the jobs of tomorrow”, because those jobs may not exist. The task now is to educate for adaptability, imagination and moral judgment, the qualities no algorithm can replace. As the historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in 1961: “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.” This is the work before us.

The government has correctly diagnosed a skills shortage. But its policy misses a meaning shortage. We need not only employable graduates but capable citizens – people able to reason ethically, collaborate across cultures and invent purpose where automation erases routine.

Higher education must recover its voice as the space where society asks its most difficult questions. What is progress for? What is prosperity without dignity? What does it mean to flourish or even to matter in an age of intelligent machines? These are not rhetorical questions – they are the foundation of survival strategies for a civilisation on the cusp of reinvention.

The courage to begin again

Universities across the world are banging the drum of transformation, insisting that doing things differently is the way forward. But how many actually are doung things differently? For all the rhetoric of innovation, much of the sector remains bound by inherited models of teaching and governance.

Into this inertia steps a new generation of institutions reimagining what a university can be. The “challenger university” model exemplified by Minerva University in the US and the London Interdisciplinary School in the UK, has begun to disrupt long-held assumptions about place, teaching and purpose.

These universities treat the world itself as a campus, fusing digital delivery, experiential learning and global immersion to craft education around curiosity rather than compliance.

Traditional universities are slowly following suit, rolling out accelerated degrees and hybrid formats with experiential learning embedded in their cities. At Royal Holloway Business School, the BSc Business and Management (London Accelerated) degree was built from this conviction. It is faster – two years all in instead of three – but not shallower.

London itself becomes the campus as students collaborate with businesses and design projects that connect innovation to ethics. They learn to work with artificial intelligence as a creative partner, not a threat.

This is not a course in survival; it is a course in significance. It teaches that employability follows from imagination, and that imagination begins with purpose. At its heart lies the courage of moral imagination: the willingness to envision not only alternative futures, but better ones.

Higher education stands at a fork in the road. One path leads deeper into optimisation: faster courses, tighter metrics, closer alignment to industry. The other path leads back to truth, curiosity and moral imagination. The first path is safe but soulless. The second is uncertain but alive.

And perhaps that is what this moment demands: to make education full of wonder again. When acceleration becomes an end in itself, education becomes soulless; when it is used to support inquiry, reflection and ethical engagement, it can do the opposite.

Universities must not only expand access but redefine ambition. They must teach not just for the labour market but for the human market – the realm of creativity, empathy and responsibility that automation cannot touch.

So yes, let us commit to no one being left behind. But let us also dare to ask: towards what? Towards compliance or consciousness? Towards growth or grace and fulfilment? If we want education to matter again, we must stop treating it as the servant of policy and start recognising it as the architect of possibility.

Lucy Gill-Simmen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.