علوم تربیتی

It is well known that emerging regions worldwide are striving to develop at an unprecedented accelerated rate their higher education systems and institutions, HEIs (Willis, 2005; Sanyal and Johnstone, 2011; Horta et al., 2015). A common feature to this process is the need to guarantee sustainable growth with adequate resources (Schwartzman, 1996). Yet, the strategic planning of this process is known to be influenced by straightforward and simple, but potentially dangerous university rankings and similar quantitative indicators (Salmi and Saroyan, 2007). Specific contexts and local conditions for growth, as well as adequate determinants of institutional capacity are often minimized, even forgotten, in the design of public policies and institutional strategies (Marginson and Considine, 2000). Rather, Institutional strategies are in- fluenced — frequently emulated — by policies and perceived practices from mature higher education systems, placing in jeopardy higher education systems and institutions themselves in emerging regions of the world (Yang, 2003).

It is in this fast changing and uncertain context that this article argues that Illities should be taken into greater account as relevant factors in modernizing and reforming higher education. Illities are nonfunctional requirements, including but not limited to accessibility, quality, sustainability, efficiency, flexibility, and capability. They are associated with modern technical solutions and depend on the way people, institutions, and the social environment interact with knowledge (De Weck et al., 2011). The understanding of illities is associated with holistic perspectives on the increasing complexity of our daily life and related technical, cultural, social and economic relations.

From the emerging technical literature about illities, lessons for higher education policies can be learned. Neufville and Scholtes (2011) have shown that projects can be improved by flexible designs that can facilitate adaptation to uncertainty. They argue that designers of complex, long-lasting projects — such as communication networks, power plants, or hospitals — but that could well be higher education institutions and systems, must learn to abandon fixed specifications and narrow forecasts. The authors stress the need to avoid the “flaw of averages,” a conceptual pitfall that traps so many designs in underperformance. This is relevant to higher education because it stresses flexibility in the design of complex higher education policies, reforms, and in creating organizational models for HEIs. It applies to planning of higher education and its links with learning societies that are expected to increasingly rely on “distributed knowledge bases” maintained across an economically and/or socially integrated set of agents and institutions (Conceição et al. 2003).