29 May 2022  Issue No: 694

After 120 roundtable sessions, 86 ‘HED’ talks and five youth-led activities, the UNESCO World Higher Education Conference 2022 concluded on Friday 20 May in Barcelona, Spain, with the announcement of a common ‘Roadmap to 2030’ and a demand that barriers to change be “blown down now”.

The third UNESCO World Higher Education Conference was held in Barcelona in Spain from 18 to 20 May 2022. The theme was Reinventing Higher Education for a Sustainable Future and the plan was to forge a common roadmap for higher education to 2030. University World News is the exclusive media partner for the conference.

A new report by UCAS, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, and the College Board forecasts that with borders opening up again after the pandemic, the volume of international undergraduate applicants for study places in the United Kingdom will increase by 46% to 208,500 by 2026.

In the absence thus far of any justification, the firing of the board of the Research Council of Norway by the minister of research and higher education points to a display of power and signals that the minister is no longer the defender of research in government.

The prospects for success when it comes to changing workplace culture are improved if the institution is receptive to broad participation from the beginning of the change process, including a discussion of the intent of the change and potential implications for different groups.

A network of 15 private institutions spread across 10 countries in four regions in North, West, Central and Southern Africa, aims to train an additional 100,000 students over five years – up from its current 61,000. It will rely heavily on collaborative digital intelligence platforms to do so.

The UNESCO World Higher Education Conference 2022 opened this week in Barcelona in Spain, reaffirming the importance of higher education as a public good and a human right, and underlining the need to promote local and global equity of university access.