Dictionary

higher education en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• (US) audio

Meanings

1. (uncountable) Education beyond a level viewed as basic, such as any beyond universal government-funded secondary education.
   • Holonym: education
   • He pursued various higher education via trade school and community college.
2. (uncountable) Education beyond a level viewed as basic, such as any beyond universal government-funded secondary education. ▸ Education at a university level or beyond. (Often with more or less connotation of education that leads to higher rank in a hierarchy of social class.)
   • What does the “higher” in higher ed mean? Nobody agrees, because nobody asks: higher than what? Neither of the two leading journals in the field of higher education studies, Research in Higher Education and Journal of Higher Education, define “higher.”¹ I've seen no think pieces in the Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed about what “higher” might mean. A lovely piece by Jennifer Frey entitled “What is higher education” does not define what “higher” means. Many pieces have been written on the etymology of “university” and on the etymology of “education” (educare versus educere). There is a substantial literature on the meaning of “liberal” in “liberal education.” There is a literature on the meaning of “academy” and on the meaning of “college.” But the word “higher” does not have a corresponding literature. In an era of access for all, it has seemed best to let sleeping definitions lie. But the definition is now being poked awake by AI, in the form of large language models (LLMs), which notice when words don’t mean what they say. LLMs are the first readers to have read everything, which means they are capable of seeing when a word is being used against its own meaning. What the LLM sees is that at most public universities, at least, “higher” is “mid,” as the world is now noticing. Nobody wants to pay higher ed prices for a mid education, especially not assembly-line mid. And in the AI era, they will stop. What did “higher” used to mean? Immanuel Kant, in The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), divided faculty into three “higher” fields (theology, law, medicine) and one “lower” (philosophy), with “higher” meaning closer to the interests of the state, not closer to truth or virtue. The state had an interest in making sure lawyers, doctors, and religious men were competent. Philosophers? Not so much. Philosophy was below the radar because it had the freest judgment. So “higher” meant proximity to state apparatus. In the U.K. and the U.S., the “higher” in higher education has meant multiple overlapping things: selectivity, refinement, and culture (in the Matthew Arnold sense of more cultivated, more polished, more removed from coarse or common things), and also abstract (meaning more theoretical, more general, more removed from the particular and the practical). For John Henry Newman, “higher” meant cultivating the mind for its own sake. In the six places he uses the term “higher” it means better.² “Higher” mathematics and physics were to him different pursuits than engineering. He wanted vocational education kept separate. But engineering entered the university in the 1860s, business in the 1880s, nursing and education and agriculture and social work and computer science and design through the twentieth century. Newman’s “higher” lost its meaning as the university admitted what he had wanted excluded. […] Thirty years later, Bill Readings argued that the Humboldtian tradition of Bildung — the cultural formation of the citizen of the nation-state, which had organized research universities since early-nineteenth-century Berlin (an idea that Brendan McCord is giving new life to) — had been displaced by the language of excellence, a word that sounds qualitative but functioned as a content-free measurement term that could be applied to anything an institution wanted to count. Excellence was the language the university adopted when it could no longer say what “higher” meant. Today “higher” often means “high scoring” in a way that is useful to funders, accreditors, and states, who like to think they are giving money to something “higher” even when it is simply “high ranking.” […] There is no clear link between “higher” and “education.” The word “higher” sits in a vector neighborhood with “rank,” “elite,” “selective,” “exclusive,” “elevated,” “superior,” even while the access discourse of the last forty years has made that whole neighborhood radioactive for anyone writing about higher education. The defenders of the humanities go to “liberal,” “free,” “contemplative,” “civic,” “humane.” The critics of the academy go to “elite,” “credential,” “gatekeeping.” Nobody goes to “higher” itself because the word’s nearest neighbors are the words you cannot use unless you are UATX. The dictionary knows what “higher” means in the language even if the academy has not been willing to say it. The result is that “higher” floats free of its neighborhood. It has become the unexamined modifier that everyone uses and nobody examines closely. “Higher” is the Beethoven’s 9th of modifiers, which everyone uses for their own political ends. 2026 May 9, Hollis Robbins, “What does the "higher" in higher ed mean? AI is forcing the question”, in Anecdotal Value [Substack newsletter]:
   • Dotcom mania was slow in coming to higher education, but now it has the venerable industry firmly in its grip. Since the launch early last year of Udacity and Coursera, two Silicon Valley start-ups offering free education through MOOCs, massive open online courses, the ivory towers of academia have been shaken to their foundations. 2013 July 20, “The attack of the MOOCs”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8845, archived from the original on 04 Apr 2021:
   • For some, the goals of their higher education involved deep meaningfulness or the frontiers of knowledge; others aspired merely to elitism. Some were honest enough to admit to themselves that meaning, service, money, and class rank were all among their motives.

Coordinates

secondary education · secondary education · basic education · primary education · basic education · primary education

Hypernyms

education · education

Synonyms

tertiary education · higher learning · tertiary-level education · higher learning · tertiary education · further education · tertiary-level education · further education

Translations (47)

is háskólamenntun (education at university level or beyond) · da videregående uddannelse (education at university level or beyond) · uk вища освіта (education at university level or beyond) · pl wyższe wykształcenie (education at university level or beyond) · pt ensino superior (education at university level or beyond) · bg висше образование (education at university level or beyond) · bg висше (education at university level or beyond) · hi उच्च शिक्षा (education at university level or beyond) · cmn 高等教育 (education at university level or beyond) · de Hochschulbildung (education at university level or beyond) · da højere uddannelse (education at university level or beyond) · nl hoger onderwijs (education at university level or beyond) · th อุดมศึกษา (education at university level or beyond) · fr enseignement supérieur (education at university level or beyond) · ja 高等教育 (education at university level or beyond) · ru вы́сшее образова́ние (education at university level or beyond) · su atikan luhur (education at university level or beyond) · ko 고등교육 (education at university level or beyond) · es educación superior (education at university level or beyond) · ro pregătire universitară (education at university level or beyond) · lt aukštàsis išsilãvinimas (education at university level or beyond) · nrf êducâtion avanchie (education at university level or beyond) · fr études supérieures (education at university level or beyond) · crh aliy tasil (education at university level or beyond) · az ali təhsil (education at university level or beyond) · tl mataas na edukasyon (education at university level or beyond) · it istruzione superiore (education at university level or beyond) · es educación más alta (education at university level or beyond) · sk vysoké školstvo (education at university level or beyond) · hu felsőoktatás (education at university level or beyond) · ro învățământ superior (education at university level or beyond) · th การศึกษาขั้นสูง (education at university level or beyond) · et kõrgharidus (education at university level or beyond) · id pendidikan tinggi (education at university level or beyond) · mk високо образование (education at university level or beyond) · ga ardoideachas (education at university level or beyond) · vi nền giáo dục đại học (education at university level or beyond) · sv akademiska studier (education at university level or beyond) · sk vysokoškolské vzdelávanie (education at university level or beyond) · fi korkeakoulutus (education at university level or beyond) · ro educație înaltă (education at university level or beyond) · sv högre utbildning (education at university level or beyond) · mi mātauranga matua (education at university level or beyond) · ro educație superioară (education at university level or beyond) · cy addysg uwch (education at university level or beyond) · sv eftergymnasial utbildning (education at university level or beyond) · sk vysokoškolské vzdelanie (education at university level or beyond)