UNESCO and the futures of higher education to 2050. For an expansion of the right to education to include higher education

Abstract

The global context of uncertainty in which we live, personally and professionally, favors the emergence and promotion of processes of participatory, horizontal reflection, at all levels of life. This also applies to education, including higher education. It is hoped that we will be able to see how we could improve what we do, how we do it, where we do it and why we do it at universities, understood in its broadest sense of higher, post-secondary or tertiary education. This year the European Commission has done so by proposing its European Strategy for Universities. Likewise, it was suggested and developed in 2021 by the UNESCO Institute of Higher Education for Latin America and the Caribbean (IIHELAC), with its Regional Consultation project on the futures of learning from the perspective of the higher education sector.

The IIHELAC Report accounted for here now is the result of several consultations with 25 world experts in the field of higher education and, as we are warned, it is not intended, in any way, to be a higher education project for 2050. It is the first of seven scheduled phases for the Futures of Higher Education project within the framework of UNESCO's flagship initiative Futures of Education. Reimagine our futures together.  In the Report there is a clear demand for a comprehensive and quality higher education for all, adapting the structures of higher education institutions to the needs and characteristics of the students and not the other way around, responding to the diversity of the student body while aiming at institutional diversification.

Throughout all the sections of the Report, considerations and themes emerge that provoke reflection, debate and questioning of apparent truths that condition the inclusive and sustainable development of higher education as a public good in the perspective of lifelong learning. Two of them seem to us to merit further reflection here. On the one hand, the need to continue advancing to secure the idea of extending the human right to education to higher education, making it truly inclusive; and, on the other hand, the clear defense that higher education institutions should indeed be centers for the creation, debate and dissemination of critical knowledge and critical thinking.