When will universities move into the digital age?

Having spent the last few years working with Universities across the UK, it surprises me that the institutions that are responsible for preparing future generations for the working world are hesitant to embrace the digital age.

The digital era is reshaping the landscape of almost every potential employer a student is going to consider, but the back end processes in many universities are largely unchanged with some still using forms and processes that were cutting edge from the days when their current class of graduates were born.

I hear regularly of academics losing hours in a month to filling in paper forms, which then get painstakingly copied into back end systems and touch an inconceivable number of hands before being processed. The digital era should be allowing universities to replace resource intensive tasks with slick digital processes, reducing the number of hands that unnecessarily touch paper forms. The digital era should be giving time back to teaching or research and student fees shouldn’t be funding antiquated processes.

Universities are under increasing pressure to demonstrate value for the student fees, with the UK now being the fifth most expensive country to study in. Students are certainly more conscious of getting more value for the increasing costs and additional years of repaying loans and feel that each pound spent needs to be justified. We see an increasing number of FOI requests initiated from student groups, who care about how the money is spent more no so than ever.

Happily the tides seem to be changing, Universities although cautious now seem to be implementing long term cloud strategies, many have undertaken assessments to identify how their internal processing compares to industry peers to identify best in class lean processes and laggards who need to review the end to end process.

Time will tell how long it will take universities to fully embrace the digital era, the working world is only going to continue to embrace and consume all it has to offer and students need to prepared to embrace it too.

“PwC research shows global GDP could be up to 14% higher in 2030 as a result of AI – the equivalent of an additional $15.7 trillion – making it the biggest commercial opportunity in today’s fast changing economy”

https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/analytics/assets/pwc-ai-analysis-sizing-the-prize-report.pdf

https://www.fenews.co.uk/press-releases/218-appjobsearch/19437-uk-universities-are-fifth-most-expensive-in-the-world-for-brits-to-attend