Global Trends in Lifelong Learning and the Response of the Universities

The argument of this article is that higher education is forced to respond to the dominant social pressures of the day, especially the demands of advanced capitalism. Globalisation has produced an international division of labour with more knowledge-based workers in the West. Higher education in those countries has, consequently, endeavoured to respond to the demands of these workers in innovative ways and these changes point the direction that higher education elsewhere might have to go. However, some countries will not have sufficient knowledge-based workers to force changes in the higher education system and market-orientated Western universities will fill that gap through new means of delivery. Where universities are not responding to the needs of the international division of labour, transnational companies are taking the initiative in creating their own universities.