The University of an Ibero-America in transition

This week Unesco celebrates in Barcelona the III World Conference on Higher Education.

A meeting and reflection space that is especially useful for Ibero-American universities that, due to the pandemic, have suffered the longest closure of face-to-face activity worldwide.

During that time, most of them have guaranteed the continuity of their teaching performance through an urgent transition and without prior planning to a virtual modality, which had little implementation.

Virtual education in Ibero-America was a minority before the pandemic, only 18% of students were enrolled in degrees in this modality and in some countries, such as Chile, Argentina, Portugal or Cuba, that percentage was less than 5%.

The growth of distance higher education, which was only a trend before the pandemic, today registers an unprecedented expansion.

Break in teaching and break in research.

In Brazil alone, the graduation of doctors between 2019 and 2020 decreased by 18%.

This is very bad news, since only 40% of Ibero-American researchers have a doctorate.

If we broaden our gaze to university professors, on average only 13% have a doctorate degree.

Figures that compromise the quality of our universities and, above all, the research muscle of the region that fundamentally resides in them.

These data can be found in the

, which we at the Organization of Ibero-American States have prepared with the support of CAF-Development Bank of Latin America, which we are going to present at the Barcelona conference.

This document concludes that Ibero-America was in transition, according to the concept of development in transition coined by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, but not in the same way the universities of the region, despite being fundamental actors to achieve that our middle-income countries are capable of overcoming traps such as productivity that hamper their growth and development.

Ibero-America has been losing productivity for half a century, today it only reaches 38% of the average productivity of the OECD.

It is difficult for this trend to be reversed, taking into account that 80% of Ibero-American youth who have graduated from our educational systems do not have profiles compatible with the most qualified jobs, which are the most stable and those with the least risk of technological substitution.

Digitization, improved productivity, declining demographics, and financial constraints herald a profound reconfiguration and reorganization of the region's university systems.

We encourage universities to deepen the reforms undertaken as a result of the pandemic, especially the digital transition, to undertake a reform that, due to its scope, is comparable to that of Córdoba in 1918. A reform that leads them to move towards a quality training offer, flexible, open and pertinent, for new student profiles and new societies, and that bet with greater determination on research and knowledge transfer.

In the report, in addition to diagnosis and analysis, you will also find a wide range of proposals to guide this urgent reform and adapt to a very different scenario from the previous one of a pandemic that has caused the desertion of between 10% and 25% of the students.

Recovering these students, and attracting others traditionally excluded from higher education through innovative training formulas and mediated by technology that makes them more accessible, is a priority for the university of an Ibero-America in transition.

Mariano Jabonero

is secretary general of the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI).

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