ABSTRACT
The challenges confronting small cities are vast: underemployment, decline in health and educational services, and depopulation. This chapter investigates the opportunities and problems when third-tier cities becoming education cities. These small cities and large towns are occasionally the location for a university, either the outlier campus of a metropolitan institution or part of a ‘regional’ university. Yet these campuses – in an environment of quality assurance monitoring and research assessment – confront multiple threats. This chapter explores the struggles confronted by regional universities and their pivotal role in the movement from an industrial to a knowledge economy.
