Higher Education and Research

High and Partially new Demands Facing Higher Education

In recent decades, the higher education sector has rapidly expanded to meet the increased demands of the labor market voiced in previous periods but also due to a political ambition to enable everyone to engage in higher education. Today, nearly 400,000 people attend a university or college each year.

Increased international competition and rapid technological developments result in the labor market gradually increasing its skill requirements. The number of highly qualified jobs continues to grow, whereas simpler jobs are being automated to a great extent. Large groups of individuals already working are also expected to return to higher education several times during their professional life.

At the same time, digitalization creates new opportunities for increasing the level of flexibility and distance learning in future course offerings.

Conditions for Research and Development

Higher education and research serve as vessels for communication. The universities train researchers who, in turn, teach students about new discoveries in their respective fields of research. The quality of the research thus affects the quality of teaching, which, in turn, affects the skills and expertise of future researchers.

A well-designed research infrastructure is a key factor for carrying out high-quality research. The current research infrastructure landscape is complex and includes a multitude of actors. Investments in infrastructure require long planning horizons, collaborations between HEIs and industry actors as well as political consensus regarding research policy.

A major change in Swedish research policy over the last few decades is moving toward more resources being transferred to the state-run research councils. They offer research funding in a competitive process to researchers working at state-run HEIs, companies and private research institutes, mainly in accordance with the subject areas decided by the government and parliament.

Since the end of the 1990s, universities are legally obligated to seek to interact with society at large in order to make their research beneficial. One way of making research beneficial is that it leads to innovations being created in society.