Even countries that are investing in their tertiary sectors are not immune to increasingly prevalent doubts about the value of higher education, a university president turned education minister has argued.
In the keynote address at 探花视频’s World Academic Summit, Einas Al-Eisa, the former president of Saudi Arabia’s Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University who is now the , told an audience of more than 700 university leaders and academics that higher education institutions were increasingly falling into what she called a “visibility blind spot”.
“Even when universities do a great job – producing excellent graduates and research – they fall short in communicating it properly,” said Al-Eisa, a medical researcher who headed Saudi Arabia’s leading women’s university for six years until her appointment to the education ministry in May 2025.
That trend was particularly evident in the US where Gallup polling figures showed the proportion of Americans who said they had either “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education had fallen from 56 per cent in 2023 to 37 per cent in 2024, explained Al-Eisa, speaking at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), where THE’s summit is taking place from
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Similar shifts were also evident in the US, Australia, Canada and several European countries over the same time frame, she noted.
Even countries such as Saudi Arabia were not immune, the minister suggested, pointing to the growing prevalance of reskilling programmes aimed at university graduates, and the number of major employers setting up their own academies, which suggested a “lack of trust” in universities. The proportion of graduates who went into jobs which were not related to their area of specialism?raised questions over whether the nation was “utilising [its] resources properly”, she continuned.
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Universities were too often “on the sidelines” of policy reforms in Saudi Arabia,?and the “mismatch” between graduate skills and the job market had to be addressed, the minister said.
Falling levels of public confidence must be tackled on a number of fronts, with institutions taking a more prominent role in society, argued Al-Eisa. “We do not see universities at the heart of community engagement,” she said.
But there was a greater need to articulate how university-based research translated into demonstrable impact for citizens, continued Al-Eisa, who suggested that “impact [should be] the core of our operating system” as universities.
“We need to plan it, organise it and reward it – it needs to be well structured in every part of our universities,” said Al-Aisa.
“Let’s have an impact dashboard for every paper,” she said, suggesting institutions should become “living labs” for research impact, which also meant producing “globally competitive graduates” who could create impact across the world.
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These comments were echoed by KAUST’s president Ed Byrne, who said his institution’s mission?was increasingly to apply globally leading research to real-world problems rather than just publishing in high-level journals.
“We have a responsibility to put impact at the front of our story,” said the former King’s College London president, who urged universities to “find a higher gear” if they wanted to win back public support.
University leaders should ask themselves a simple question, said Byrne. “Are we making the greatest impact that we can in the areas that society needs to have the greatest capacity?” he said, suggesting allowing impact to remain the “weakest of the three pillars” of a university’s mission, alongside education and research, is not tenable.
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“If we stay in the same place things will be much worse in five years,” he said.
However, Shitij Kapur, the current King’s College London president, pushed back on the idea that research impact should become the overriding priority of most universities, even research-intensive ones.
In a later panel session, Kapur argued the “single biggest contribution [made by universities] is not producing knowledge or applying it, it is people”, referring to the thousands of graduates of all levels exiting institutions each year.
“It would be a tragedy if we forget that is the single biggest contribution made to research,” he continued, noting the vast majority of research and innovation took place in the private sector staffed by outstanding graduates.
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