Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)

Secretary General Per Nyborg Presentation

Home | About | Background | Program & Proceedings | Participants | Readings

CSHE > Events > Peder Saether Symposium > Program & Proceedings > Secretary General Per Nyborg Presentation

Secretary General Per Nyborg, Norwegian Council of Universities

(Introductory remarks from the Chair of the panel)

There are at least two different approaches to the problem of determining costs. The first is to consider the cost for the university to meet the pedagocical challenges of ICT. With this approach, the answer may very well be that although it is costly, the university has no choice, the investment must be made. Otherwise, competition may very soon put you out of business. The other approach starts from the concept of access, defining the economic and the social dimension of tertiary education, of which universities are important but not sole providers.

The 1997 OECD report on tertiary education estimated that 80% of the population in OECD countries may become involved in tertiary education in the near future. Obviously, not even social democratic governments in Scandinavian countries will be able to pay for this. As life-long learning is now seen as a necessity in industry and business, it has also become a matter for organisations in the labour market. Schemes for paying for life-long learning are now part of the negotiations between industry and labour unions, at least in the Scandinavian countries. In Norway, this is done on a national scale, defining a national system for life-long learning. The Norwegian University Network for Life-Long Learning (Norgesuniversitetet) is part of this system; not only a network operated!by the institutions, it will also be a meeting-place between higher education and the organisations in the labour market. Still, this does not answer all the questions. Those with the greatest needs for training and retraining may be the unemployed. Should society pay for their retraining? We do that in Norway, but even so, there will be losers. In any case, we can not avoid social costs.

For me, this brings together two main aspects of this question: the new role of the university in a changing learning environment, and the issue of equity and social cohesion in a rapidly developing society. I believe it is a major challenge to redefine the traditional role of the university, not merely as a place of research and teaching at the tertiary level, but also as an institution responding to the growing needs of society facing the prospect of life-long learning.