From One Thousand to One Million - Increasing the Impact of Chevening Scholarships

The Chevening scholarship fund has grown to over £60 million per year, helping over 1,000 students receive a scholarship to study at a UK university.

However, in an era of ever advancing digital technology, £60 million a year could and should help a lot more than a thousand people.

The UK government could radically increase the impact of the fund by shifting from paying for people to study in the UK on expensive courses to instead creating a financial incentive for a global digital university. That university would make access to an elite education available to anyone with an internet connection at a fraction of the cost of current offerings.

While the £60 million alone would not be enough to transform higher education access, it would create a clear and powerful demand signal to mobilise investment into digitising higher education.

The advance of AI has put Higher Education in a Blockbuster-Netflix moment; universities are like the Blockbuster stores of old, renting physical DVDs in limited quantities, as opposed to Netflix which enabled anyone to stream any film anytime they wished.

Just as Netflix needed better technology – cheap, widespread high-speed internet access and widespread computer/tablet ownership – to make their model viable, so too digital higher education has needed the advancement of AI.

Digital education no longer need just be video recordings of lectures, which has created a perception of digital learning as passive learning which is inferior to face to face. In 2025, digital could now offer an immersive, interactive and tailored education for any student, vastly super-seeding anything a conventional university can offer, teaching more, better, and faster than ever before.

While university campuses are still valuable locations to bring people together to learn and share ideas, the current teaching processes are now out of date. Instead of a lecture to 40 students on one campus, the same lecture can now be delivered to a better standard and made interactive to enhance learning, to millions of students worldwide.

That radically changes the economics of higher education; if several million people will study the same module, a lot more money can be spent developing it because of the economies of scale. The combination of enhanced digital technology enabling highly effective interactive learning alongside the vastly larger budgets of a digital system compared to a face-to-face institutions offer the chance to transform higher education.

The Chevening scholarship should be seeking to digitise higher education and work to develop campuses, big and small, around the world to create spaces where students can gain access to the same elite education wherever they are in the world, and at a fraction of the current cost.

This is an opportunity for a giant leap forward for humanity; knowledge is power. High-quality, interactive teaching through a digital platform on face-to-face campuses offers the social benefits of traditional university but at a lower cost. And the better education would help people to stay relevant in a digital, AI-enabled world.

Digital education could also share the knowledge and skills needed for those living in poverty or facing risks of natural disaster and famine to rescue themselves from harm, teaching better agriculture techniques, understanding insurance, and enhancing disaster risk reduction, for example.

Someone once said a great achievement of Capitalism was that the President of the USA drinks the same Diet Coke as the homeless man on the street. AI affords the opportunity to create such equality with education, and the British Government could be at the forefront of that drive, helping to transform the world for the better.