In today’s rapidly evolving environment, universities face a pivotal challenge: reconnecting with the communities they serve. Long revered as bastions of knowledge and discovery, higher education institutions worldwide now grapple with a growing disconnect between their traditional roles and public expectations.
Globally, recent surveys on public attitudes towards higher education paint a concerning picture: confidence in the sector is dwindling. In the United States, confidence in universities has reached a historic low this year, with nearly one-third of adults expressing little to no confidence in higher education, up from 25% in 2023. The UK faces a similar scenario, where trust in higher education institutions has slumped over the past few years, with only 57% recognising universities are important contributors to the national economy, according to the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI).
Australia is not immune to this trend. In 2023, 83% of Australians surveyed worried that universities prioritise revenue over education, while 68% expressed concern about increasingly large class sizes and suboptimal teacher-to-student ratios. More alarmingly, public confidence in Australian universities has steadily declined, dropping from 81.1% in 2008 to just 67.9% in 2023.
These figures underscore a critical issue: the erosion of universities’ social license. It is no coincidence that last week, Jason Clare, Minister for Education, reiterated the need to ‘protect the social license for the system to continue to operate.’
While Clare’s comments were made in the context of international education—questionably framing the introduction of international student caps as a measure to rebuild public confidence in higher education—his invocation of social license underscores a broader imperative. It brings to the fore the fundamental importance of universities not only achieving but also sustaining the acceptance, approval, and trust of their communities to maintain their right to operate in diverse socio-geographic contexts and spaces.
In this context, social license emerges as the foremost metric of success for higher education institutions. It serves as a barometer of the legitimacy and credibility an institution holds in society, measured by its ability to meet societal expectations and contribute positively to the community.
Unlike traditional performance metrics such as global rankings and/or research output, social license captures the intangible yet crucial relationship between universities and the public they serve. It reflects the alignment between an institution’s strategic direction and the values, needs, gaps, and aspirations of its communities, thereby serving as a more holistic and meaningful measure of a university’s true impact and relevance in today’s rapidly evolving social landscape.
The Challenge
Australian universities face a paradigm shift. Historically, university governance and management has understood societal impact as the natural byproduct of an institution’s successful delivery of their education and research agendas.
This long-unchallenged perspective has historically manifested in two primary assumptions: firstly, that societal benefit flows from ‘producing qualified graduates’ through transformative education; and secondly, that positive social change inherently results from the application of new knowledge, research outcomes and scientific discoveries.
In our current era of uncertainty, these long-held assumptions must be tested for validity and relevance. The indirect and often incidental approach to community engagement has become increasingly misaligned with the evolving expectations of the Australian public. Citizens now demand more deliberate and tangible contributions from their tax-payer-funded higher education institutions, a trend likely to intensify as inflationary pressures and cost-of-living concerns escalate. This shift in public sentiment underscores the urgent need for universities to reevaluate their societal impact strategies, moving from passive byproducts of their core activities to proactive, purposeful engagement with the communities they serve.
Recently, the rising prominence of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles has catalysed a renewed interest within the higher education sector to redefine its societal role. This shift has manifested in a deliberate effort to align university strategic frameworks with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs). Through this alignment, Australian universities have sought to guide, measure, and benchmark their successes beyond student surveys, and the often-opaque and obfuscated methodologies of global rankings.
Despite their valuable merit, these initiatives have largely remained peripheral to universities’ core operations, falling short of the transformative potential they hold. The sector has yet to embrace a truly integrated, holistic approach that can fundamentally reimagine its value proposition to society. This gap between intention and implementation highlights the need for a more profound shift in how universities conceptualise and operationalise their role in community engagement and social impact.
Emerging Approaches
To truly evolve, universities must move beyond superficial alignments and embed societal impact at the heart of their missions, strategies, and day-to-day operations.
Recognising the need for such transformation, the Universities Accord proposes a bold new mandate: universities must now explicitly commit to fostering a robust, equitable, and resilient democracy while driving national progress across economic, social, and environmental domains. This evolution demands a fundamental reimagining of how universities engage with and contribute to their communities.
To regain public trust, universities must move beyond traditional outreach activities (often performed with a ‘transactional lens’). True community engagement involves forging deep, reciprocal relationships characterised by mutual learning (moving away from paternalistic approaches to community engagement), collaborative problem-identification and solving, and shared resources. In this regard, effective strategies span initiatives such as:
- Place-based approaches tailored to local needs. These must be co-developed with community stakeholders, from ideation through to execution.
- Co-designed service-learning projects. This approach enables students to see how the application of their newly-acquired knowledge can be used to advance a community’s goals and aspirations.
- Opening university spaces for public dialogue. This includes but extends beyond the opening of physical campuses for multistakeholder community, industry, and government conversations.
- Scaling the alignment of interdisciplinary research priorities with community challenges by leveraging community-engaged research (CER) frameworks.
By adopting this more holistic approach, Australian universities can become powerful catalysts for social progress and democratic engagement.
Increasingly, the future success of universities will be measured not just by global rankings performance or research output, but by their tangible, positive impacts on the communities they serve. By elevating community engagement to a strategic imperative, Australian universities can cement their position as indispensable, trusted institutions deeply embedded in the fabric of our society.
This unique societal role and deep-rooted community connection give universities a distinct advantage that new entrants to the education sector, such as Big Tech companies, cannot easily replicate. While these tech giants may offer innovative educational platforms, they lack the historical context, physical presence, and multifaceted community relationships that universities have cultivated over generations.
As they navigate this changing landscape, universities have the chance to emerge as vital forces in safeguarding and strengthening our democracy – a role that has never been more crucial as in today’s increasingly unequal, fractious and polarised society.
Dr Alejandra Gaitan Barrera is a senior strategy advisor, currently Senior Strategy & Transformation Manager at Macquarie University.
Dr Govand Azeez is a political economist and philosopher, currently a Lecturer in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences. *
*The opinions presented in this piece are solely those of the authors and do not represent the stance of the university or any institution with which they are associated.
