The New Power University: The social purpose of higher education in the 21st century

Chapter 6

New power Gen Z students

New power Gen Z students are change makers who will help take the world into a less ideological and more humanitarian era

Like every generation, today’s students have their own set of values and lived experiences that shape their expectations of a university education. Unlike other generations, though, they are coming to that education at an historically rare ‘in-between time’, such that their attitudes, behaviours and ways of seeing the world are likely to have an unusually profound effect on the social purpose of the New Power University.

Generation Z – usually shortened to Gen Z – is a term that has been adopted by demographers to denote anyone born between 1995 and 2012, so aged between 8 and 25 years old ...