About the Research
In a period of profound uncertainty and disruption, we believe leaders need the strategic foresight to look beyond immediate pressures, challenge long-held assumptions, and imagine new possibilities.
We embarked on this research project to support that work.
We conducted 20 in-depth interviews with presidents, vice-chancellors and senior executives from universities across the UK, Europe and the US. The conversations explored four key questions about the future of HE:
- What trends and forces will most significantly shape HE by 2040?
- What will society need and expect from its universities in 2040?
- What might a successful university in 2040 look like?
- What radical shifts will universities need to make to thrive in this future?
The research findings do not offer simple answers. Instead, they provoke new conversations, challenge established thinking, and open up the strategic imagination required for the decades ahead.
Our HE Futures research paper will be published and presented at the Summit.
Join The Conversation
Fortune will favour the brave. We have to push ourselves out of our traditional modes of delivery and thinking. Vice-Chancellor, HE Futures Interview
Key Trends and Forces
From our conversations with university leaders, what emerges is not simply a list of pressures, but a picture of a sector moving through a deep transition.
A consensus emerged of a number of powerful forces that are set to reshape higher education over the next 15 years, including:
- Increasing pressure on the current university business model
- AI transforming knowledge, work and learning
- The fragmentation of the learner journey
- A volatile global landscape for talent and ideas
- The rise of place: universities as civic and economic anchors
- A shifting social contract between universities and the public
- Growing stratification of institutional futures
Societal Expectations
One message was clear: society may not be united in what it wants from its universities as we look towards 2040.
Expectations are diverging and, in some cases, pulling in opposite directions.
Some may want universities to lead boldly — speaking truth to power, shaping public understanding, and guiding society through uncertainty. Others want to limit their influence, contain their voice, or challenge their legitimacy.
Amidst this complexity, several broad expectations for 2040 emerged from the interviews:
- Universities as engines of shared prosperity
- Human development at the heart of the mission
- Learning as a lifelong entitlement
- Demand for more open, accessible and porous universities
- A shift from prestige to impact
- Leadership in an age of uncertainty and misinformation
We need a new social contract with the public — one built on humility and co-creation. Pro-Vice-Chancellor, HE Futures Interview
The University of 2040
From our conversations, a successful university in 2040 is not simply a more efficient version of today’s institution. It is a reimagined organisation — one that has reshaped its identity, its purpose and its relationships with society.
Success in 2040 is defined not by tradition or scale, but by clarity, contribution and adaptability.
A set of defining characteristics emerged:
- Purpose-led, not prestige-led
- Distinctive, not comprehensive
- Anchored in place, connected to the world
- Digitally fluent and intelligently augmented
- Interdisciplinary, challenge-driven and co-created
- Built for lifelong learning
- Powered by a renewed academic mission
- Measured by the difference it makes
The Radical Shifts
Across our conversations, many leaders described the need for fundamental, structural and cultural shifts — transformations that would redefine how universities think, organise and act in order to thrive in the context of 2040.
Yet the picture was not solely one of challenge.
Leaders also highlighted significant strengths across the sector: innovations already underway, new forms of partnership, and signs of a more agile, outward-facing mindset beginning to take shape and make a difference.
The radical shifts — and their implications for university leadership — will be unpacked and explored fully in our forthcoming research paper and at the HE Futures Summit.
We hope you can join us.
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Elementa Leadership is a specialist leadership and organisational development consultancy for higher education passionate about the future of universities as central to the development of a better world.