In ancient Greece, the “gymnasium” was not a gym. It was the public space to which the free citizens returned throughout their life: there they trained the body, cultivated judgment, and wove the relationships that sustained communal life. In its three great ones—the Academy, the Lyceum, the Cinosarges—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle taught. Not a stage of youth: infrastructure for a lifetime, a place to return to.

I think of that image every time I see a young person—and their parents—facing the decision of career and university. Both ask themselves the same question: Is it worth it? What to study? And almost all of them face it blindly: the map of the previous generation no longer works.

Because the trick that worked for half a century—choosing the “safe” career—has stopped working. Two years ago, computer science was the safe bet; since 2019, hiring of recent graduates in major tech companies in the U.S. has fallen by more than half, and in Europe, junior engineering positions by 72% in a year. It wasn’t secure: it was just legible for a moment. Where classrooms are still filling up, it is barely noticeable, but it is a matter of when: the uncertainty about the return of so many careers, underemployment, and the frustration of studying not what one is passionate about, but what promises employment, are already common patterns. And that job is not guaranteed either: the student loses twice, because they give up their vocation without receiving the certainty they were promised.

Neither the young person nor their parents are wrong in their choice: they are asking a question that no longer has an answer. No decision made at eighteen can secure a nearly five-decade-long career, which is no longer linear, in which one changes careers—not just jobs—multiple times. The degree, which for generations differentiated, has become the floor and not the ceiling: when 42% of OECD adults have it —27% in 2000— it stops distinguishing, and the university loses its role as a social elevator. In the United States, where the course is paid for on credit, student debt exceeds 1.7 trillion dollars; in Europe the bill is lower, but the direction is the same. The diploma is not that it is not worth it: it is that it is no longer enough.

The value, moreover, has not disappeared: it has shifted. It flees from the center—the generic knowledge, the task that the machine already performs—towards two extremes. On one hand, the technical trade: while graduates are underemployed, skilled trades have been at the top of the hardest jobs to fill for years. On the other hand, human judgment which is what humanities cultivate—redefining a problem, making decisions under uncertainty, growing as a citizen. And a paradox: pressured by immediate employability, many universities are cutting back on that second aspect. Only in the United Kingdom have nearly 4,000 degrees been eliminated in a year, with the humanities being the most affected: what takes the longest to bear fruit—and is most valued in a long life—is pruned for a return that expires with the next wave.

It is important to understand why it is not temporary. Two forces are multiplying: life has been extended and change has accelerated; a longer life goes through more disruptions and requires reinventing itself more often. Artificial intelligence did not initiate the process—the wear and tear had been there for a while—but it broke the last standing horizon: what unfolded over decades, and could still be anticipated within the four years of a career, is now compressed into months. It is not surprising that trust plummeted: in the United States, it fell from 57% to 36% between 2015 and 2024. Families registered the gap before the institutions.

However, in the absence of a clearly defined career trajectory, what factors should be taken into consideration when choosing a career? Not making a better bet: stop betting everything on a single card at eighteen.

A professional life today is based on three pillars, and none of them are acquired all at once:

1. Continuous updating: skills expire faster than careers, and keeping them up to date is no longer an advantage, but a condition for survival.
2. Flexibility in the face of change, and even the need to reinvent oneself professionally: what matters is not what is already known, but the ability to relearn, and sometimes to start from scratch.
3. Social and relational capital: with a nuance, vertical capital —that of a company, a profession, a sector— is not enough, as it does not transfer when changing fields; horizontal capital is needed, a network that crosses sectors.

No company can provide all of these pillars; the university, which encompasses all disciplines and several generations, can. The three are remade over decades. None of them fit into four years of youth.

Sustaining all three requires a place to belong and return to. And for that, it is not necessary to reinvent the university: it is enough to remember what it was. “Universitas” did not mean degree, but community: teachers and students associated to learn together; the former did not have buildings, they were people. That model was not scalable, and over the centuries, the university became a stage, gaining something extraordinary —democratizing knowledge, moving the social elevator of the 20th century— at the cost of connection, continuity, and belonging. The 21st century changes the equation: the technology that broke its monopoly on content finally allows us to offer that original infrastructure to hundreds of thousands of people for decades, and to meet the three demands —and the citizen’s perspective— not just once, but for a lifetime.

That changes the meaning of a single day. Today, graduation is the last time the student belongs to their university: a farewell. At the “gymnasium”, there is no farewell. It’s not about returning—returning would imply having left—but about not leaving: a place to which one belongs, not just to which one returns. The diploma and the gown are still there, but they no longer say “you have finished” but rather “this is still yours”. Who at thirty-four needs to relearn something that didn’t even exist in their career doesn’t return as a visitor: they never stopped belonging.

That is why the day that truly matters is not the graduation day, but the entry day: that is when belonging begins, and everything else —including the degree— are stages within it. And that places the first responsibility on them, which is often overlooked today: that each student takes away three things that no syllabus can replace:

1. Self-knowledge: who they are, their strengths, what they want from their life;
2. The ability to learn: even across disciplines, with curiosity as the driving force; and
3. Relational capacities: creating and maintaining connections and networks over time.

They are, in seed form, the three previous demands—updating, flexibility, and relational capital—and they only take root if they are planted at the beginning, not if they are added at the end.

The university should not move just because students need it; it should move because the university itself needs to. In the more mature systems, —such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada— the model is already showing signs of exhaustion: closures, mergers, deficits, declining enrollments. And not by chance does it appear there first: the more mature a university system, the more evident the symptoms. The best do not fail; they are ahead.

And yet, the university continues to fight to capture a single age group in the degrees that everyone competes for, spends more on attracting new students than on retaining for life those it has already trained, and treats continuous education as a separate business and alumni as a department, instead of organizing around the lifelong student. Some have already understood the shift: Arizona State University reorganized its mission toward lifelong learning, and Stanford 2025 proposed replacing the “alumni” with the “populi”, a permanent population of learners. The direction does not need to be invented: it needs to be decided. It is not a minor turn, it is a profound change in economic and organizational model. However, this turn, possibly, sooner or later will have to be faced by universities.

There lies its greatest risk and its greatest wasted asset: the hundreds of thousands it has already trained. Because that infrastructure is already being built, just outside the university. Coursera surpasses 197 million users: it has the content and the brand, but not the institution —nor the community and the web of relationships that only a university sustains for decades. It will not be a task for the universities alone: it requires changing an accreditation designed for four years and a funding system that rewards enrollment over support. But if it is not built inside, it will be built outside. And the cost will not be borne by the universities, but by those who need them the most: the workers who become obsolete halfway through their careers, the young people of 2030 and 2035, and the economies that will see their human capital migrate to foreign platforms.

The university does not need to reinvent itself: it needs to remember what it has always been—a community of people who learn together throughout their lives—and honor it on the scale that the 21st century allows, before others decide for it.

And to that family that asks which career is the safe one, I wouldn’t give a name, because none of them are. I would tell them to stop looking for the perfect bet and look for something else: a place that remains theirs at forty and fifty, every time the world—and their child—changes. Not a bet, but a relationship.

In a previous article, I posed the question: “What if universities were the strategic industries of the 21st century?” That question was grounded in a clear reality: today, universities are enabling conditions for territorial development and, in particular, critical infrastructure in the innovation economy.

One of the key conclusions was the need for a shift in narrative: moving from missions (“what do we do?”), typically expressed through outputs, to impacts (“what changes does the university generate in its territory of reference?”). More precisely: what actually happens—thanks to the university and in an attributable way—within the territory?

Rankings and accreditation systems have consolidated a strong focus on university outputs—such as graduates, publications, research metrics, or academic reputation—while paying far less attention to the real changes those outputs generate in people’s lives, in local economies, and in territories. At the same time, they tend to measure all institutions using the same yardstick, without sufficiently accounting for context, specific challenges, or differentiated institutional responses.

Throughout my professional career, I have had the opportunity to work with and assess many institutions through evaluation and accreditation processes. Some of them—despite modest ranking positions or difficulties in meeting certain international standards—left a strong impression due to their ability to act as genuine engines of transformation in their territories.

Much more rarely, I have also observed the opposite case: institutions that skillfully master the current rules of international academic prestige, yet whose transformative impact on their immediate territory is less visible or less  intentional than one might expect based on what they project.

There is an additional implication here. If we understand universities as strategic industries for regions and countries, then public policy—and philanthropy as well—should treat them more as investments than as expenditures. The immediate question that follows is: what types of returns should we expect from that investment, across territories and over time?

I refer to transformation vectors as the main pathways through which a university generates change in its territory. These changes materialize as visible short-term effects and as medium- and long-term systemic impacts—those that reshape capabilities, specialization, social cohesion, and future opportunities.

This way of organizing impact does not stem from an isolated intuition. It is grounded in recurring evidence from international literature and in comparative analyses of university contribution and impact reports.

Based on that evidence, we can outline—very succinctly—the seven vectors of transformation.

This is the most extensively studied vector in the literature on university impact. Universities influence territorial economies through four main channels:

1. Their demand footprint (spending and investment that generate employment and value added);
2. “Exportable” spending attracted to the territory (non-local students and visitors);
3. Investment that follows talent and scientific excellence; and
4. Medium-and long-term productivity spillovers (specialization, wage growth, and competitiveness).

This vector distinguishes between the static snapshot of demand effects and deeper supply-side effects that are less immediate but far more transformative.

Impact is not just about how many people graduate, but about how their life trajectories change: employability, earnings, social mobility, alignment with strategic sectors, and continuous skill renewal. International evidence consistently shows wage premiums and productivity effects associated with higher education.

There are also indirect effects beyond individual graduates: rising professional standards, peer effects, and knowledge ecosystems that expand opportunity across
the territory.

Research generates impact when it is used: in pilots, standards, processes, and products; when science and talent anchor sectors and foster clusters; and when universities give rise to new firms (spin-offs, startups, and alumni-founded  companies).

The focus should not be on simply counting publications, patents, or licenses, but on knowledge adoption and its translation into real change: innovation, improved public services, high-quality jobs, and scalable ventures. It is no coincidence that leading entrepreneurial ecosystems tend to form around research-intensive universities.

Global openness becomes a local advantage when universities attract and retain international talent, connect territories to global science, technology, and investment networks, and co-produce results that are applied in firms and public services.

Beyond additional revenue, internationalization positions territories differently in terms of talent, dynamism, and global projection—structural conditions that significantly enhance their capacity to compete and innovate.

Universities act as civic infrastructure: they open facilities, curate culture and science, purchase from local suppliers, and reshape land and buildings (campuses, residences, urban corridors). Their ability to attract complementary actors amplifies impact—not only drawing talent in, but also retaining local talent that might otherwise leave.

Effects are visible in urban vitality, neighborhood regeneration, and  complementary economic activity, though tensions (housing, coexistence, service pressure) can arise without shared governance.

This vector captures social and environmental effects inside and beyond the campus. It focuses on change—not just activity—in areas such as social mobility and equity, sustainable practices, civic and democratic values, and environmental behavior.

When combined with quality and relevance, higher education can improve employment, health, and equality of opportunity, while advancing green  technologies, territorial resilience, and social cohesion. Universities are among the most powerful agents of social transformation.

Articulation and governance are the enabling layer that converts university activity into scalable and sustainable impact. They define who decides with whom and for what purpose, align incentives, establish collaboration rules, and connect institutional strategy with territorial priorities.

Evidence from innovation systems and regional development shows stronger impact when universities operate as articulating nodes and neutral spaces for coordination and shared agendas. Universities are—or should be—privileged arenas for addressing major societal challenges and enabling collaboration among economic and social actors.

The impacts described across these seven vectors do not arise solely from how universities perform their three core missions—teaching, research, and knowledge transfer or societal engagement.

Evidence shows that human capital is not only an outcome of university activity, but also its primary catalyst of impact. Beyond buildings, assets, or institutional tradition, universities are ultimately defined by the talent ecosystems they create, attract, and activate over time: leaders, administrators, faculty, researchers, and—most importantly—students and alumni.

Alumni, in particular, are living evidence of university impact and among its most powerful agents of transformation. They constitute a strategic asset that rarely  appears in balance sheets or academic statistics and often receives insufficient attention, yet over time they frequently make the decisive difference by materializing the impacts associated with each transformation vector.

These seven vectors provide an analytical and narrative framework to understand how, where, and for whom a university transforms its territory—through its actions and through the talent ecosystem it activates.

Above all, impact is highly contextual. Territories differ in development levels, challenges, and absorptive capacity. A high-impact university is one that aligns its activity with the needs of its environment, activating most strongly the vectors that matter most in that specific context.

From an impact perspective, excellence is no longer a single ladder but a family of profiles, defined by the type of transformation generated and the surrounding  context. For instance:

• Territorial anchor universities
• Cluster- and sector-driving universities
• Universities focused on social mobility and equity
• Expanded human-capital universities
• Research-intensive universities with systemic effects
• Civic universities

Many institutions combine several profiles. The key is not labeling, but recognizing that there is no single model of excellence. Each university is a system of contributions with strengths and limits that only make sense in light of its purpose and context.

Rankings and accreditation systems remain useful tools for quality  improvement, but they are insufficient to identify high-impact universities. High impact must be intentional—anchored in a clear, shared vision of the  transformations through which institutional purpose will be demonstrated.

Recognizing the transformative role of universities is not an act of complacency—it raises the bar. If impact is the proof of purpose and of real mission performance, then it must be assessed—not merely for reputational reasons, but because what gets measured becomes the focus of strategic attention and governance priorities.
An impact-oriented approach requires universities to ask themselves questions  such as:

• What kind of university do we want to be—and for whom?
• Which transformation vectors do we truly prioritize?
• Which territorial and productive-system needs are we addressing?
• How do we build and nurture our talent ecosystem over time?
• What evidence demonstrates that we are succeeding, and with what effects
• How is this impact logic embedded in strategy and governance?

At a time when the contribution of universities is increasingly questioned, it is more important than ever to articulate that contribution beyond current standards—not as reputational justification, but as a criterion for guiding missions, decisions, investments, and partnerships toward demonstrable impact.

Because impacts are the evidence of purpose in action

Which transformation vectors does our university truly activate?

What, in practice, distinguishes it as a high-impact university?