4.4 Valuing Higher Education Dr S Badat, Vice-Chancellor of Rhodes University, led the presentation which highlighted the following key issues: * A changing world: The world was dramatically different from a few decades and even a few years ago, owing to globalisation. Globalisation has exercised an immense influence on the nature of institutions that impact on higher education, and on the ways and means of providing higher education. It also shaped education both in terms of content and that which was researched, both in student interests and university offerings away from broader academic studies and towards narrower vocational programmes. Public investment in higher education had come to be justified largely in terms of economic growth and the preparation of students for the labour market. Neo- liberalism had come to define universities as supermarkets for a variety of public and private goods that were currently in demand, and whose value was defined by financial value. * The purposes of higher education: The first purpose of higher education was the production of knowledge which advances understanding of the natural and social worlds, and enriches humanity's accumulated scientific and cultural inheritances. The second purpose of universities was the dissemination of knowledge, in ways that contributed to the formation and cultivation of the cognitive character of students as well as the wider public. The other purpose of universities was to undertake community engagement. Higher education should play at least five key roles, namely, the cultivation of highly educated people, research and scholarship, engagement with the intellectual and cultural life of societies, democracy and democratic citizenship and development needs and challenges.