Yesterday Changes and Future Challenges Within and Around the Institutions of Higher Education

Abstract

Most institutions of higher learning have overlooked, or have even neglected, the consequences of rapidly changing role of knowledge and of its capitalization in the form of intellectual and social capital. Besides new knowledge and skills acquisition, an individual student, while at the school, changes his/her attitudes, motivations, and even perceptions. These are extremely important elements of his/her potential to acquire both explicit and tacit knowledge. Yet, very few universities have attempted to measure that human potential and to monitor its possible changes. Still fewer have even considered ways and measures to link ever changing human capital embedded in individual students with their own structural capital. The reasons and ways to do it are suggested and explained in the paper. If followed, they might result in universities becoming the centers of what may be termed “Societyentrepreneurship”. This would be to the benefit of all involved - societies, businesses, universities, and the individual students.