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Japan ’ s higher education system has struggled with a shrinking decline in university-aged people since the 90s . Picture : Carl Court / Getty Images .
‘ Seismic shift ’
Major changes in the world ’ s population of learners .
By Selena Bartlett , Martin Betts and Stephen Shaw
The global world of higher education has been depicted for generations as a continuously expanding landscape , of campus-based places , where young people visit , reside , and interact .
The settings have been for young people to pursue study , experience rites of passage , and to learn , as pioneering emergent scholars and novice professionals , to set themselves up with knowledge , relationships , and memories to serve a lifetime .
The blueprints , visual imagery , and typecasting for delivering relevant experiences has been of young people bringing ever growing vibrancy and life to places where they have needed more space to learn and grow together .
What will our depictions and blueprints become , and how will we visualise and typecast higher education settings of the future , when there are far fewer young people on the planet and the vast majority of our learners are from an ageing population of lifelong learners . Welcome to the world of global population decline and declining birth rates and their impact on a future of higher education .
Japan and parts of Europe including Italy , Germany and Spain , have been the first societies to experience what has become a global phenomenon , now even more pronounced in South Korea and Thailand , of rapidly declining birth rates . These are leading to inevitable and catastrophic future population decline and population ageing . For the past fifteen years there have been an average of two schools a day closing in Japan because of the declining number of school age children .
Births in China have fallen by 40 per cent in less than a decade , while even India has seen births fall by over 10 per cent in the same timeframe .
But even in Australia , and in common with every country in the world now , other than currently in Sub-Saharan Africa , the clear trend is towards a gap between the number of newly born people and those of older ages in need of support from them .
Other than parts of Africa , It is unavoidable that between 20-40 years from now , eligible school leaver populations globally will decline rapidly and that regardless of participation rates , and unsolvable by migration , school leaver
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