ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1929, a few weeks before the October stock market crash, a young Peter Drucker, not yet twenty years old, published one of the first econometric papers, predicting that the only way the New York stock market could go was up. The (later renowned) management theorist acknowledged that this study ‘proceeded from a self-evident assumption by means of impeccable mathematics to an asinine conclusion’ (2000, p. 451).
Futurists always measure their batting average by counting how many things they have predicted that have come true. They never count how many important things come true that they did not predict. Everything a forecaster predicts may come to pass. Yet he may not have seen the most meaningful of the emergent realities or, worse still, may not have paid attention to them. There is no way to avoid this irrelevancy in forecasting, for the important and distinctive are always the result of changes in values, perception, and goals, that is, in things that one can divine but not forecast.
(Drucker, 2005, p. 4)We would do well to heed Drucker’s caveat that it is futile to predict the future. At the same time, in higher education we need both to anticipate and to plan for it. Helpfully, as another famous American, Abraham Lincoln, reminded us, the best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time. This allows us at least to speculate, from the vantage point of the present, on the characteristics of the political and economic environment we currently find ourselves in. Although the many higher education systems discussed earlier in this volume are positioned differently around the world in terms of the national economic climates they inhabit at present, significant trends are discernible at a global level, within which distinctive policy avenues seem to be opening up for higher education.