Impact of Higher Education

The impact of higher education is a description or assessment of its effects and influences on the world. A distinction is commonly made between two sets of impacts. There are those that figure within the academy, styled academic, or scholarly impacts. There are those that extend beyond the academy, termed ‘societal’ or ‘wider impacts’. These internal and external effects flow from the core functions of contemporary higher education—research and teaching—and from its involvements in knowledge exchange, commercial enterprise, and public engagement. The impacts are intellectual, practical, personal, social, cultural, economic, and environmental. They bear on the learning and lives of individuals, communities, and organisations, as well as the working of societies, economies, and polities.

Growth in the number, range, and importance of these impacts is a ...