To reinvent higher education, we need to fix inequalities

After two years of time spent on virtual webinars – some of which have tried our patience and interest – UNESCO’s World Higher Education Conference in Barcelona, which finished on 20 May, was a breath of fresh air.

The WHEC 2022 was more than an occasion for seeing old colleagues, networking and exchanging views on the pressing challenges that higher education is facing around the world.

It was an opportunity to take stock of what higher education institutions, academics and students have experienced during the pandemic and what we all aspire to be and to become in this age of sustainable development.



Across several panel discussions and talks, inequality in the right to education and access and inequality in participation and success in higher education were under the spotlight.

In my own HED talk, titled “Is higher education doomed with inequalities”, I discussed how inequalities can be accumulated across different levels of education, in both formal and informal education settings and at the intersection of the gender, age, linguistic, ethnic, socio-economic, migration and parental backgrounds of students.

Access to higher education

As higher education institutions reflect the realities of our societies, one much-debated topic during the conference was the divide between higher and lower socio-economic groups and their right to and access to higher education.

The truth is that the cost of university has been rising and many students are graduating with unmanageable debts. In the United Kingdom, for example, tuition costs have increased by 238% in less than two decades and it is likely to become almost impossible for low-income families to finance a university education.

A few student representatives who attended the conference raised concerns over the flagrant failures of their governments in providing access and opportunities to success for students from lower socio-economic or rural backgrounds.

A few of them were thankful that they had received private scholarships, but said this meant that their governments were failing to implement the Abidjan Principles on the Right to Education, a point that I raised during a session on privatisation and the right to higher education, reported in another article in University World News.

Without a solution to these inequalities, we risk shutting out a generation of bright, creative thinkers and depriving our societies of a good part of our collective intelligence.

Likewise, inequalities in higher education are also evident in the digital divide that affected some 800 million young people across the world and led to an 11.8% and 8% drop-out rate respectively among young men and women in the European Union during the pandemic.

There were also concerns over the gender divide and employment prospects associated with different degree subjects. For example, STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are becoming increasingly popular and have better employment prospects, but are still attracting more young men than women.

Vocational training, for instance, cannot be an alternative for lower socio-economic students simply because our higher education systems steer them towards vocational colleges as less costly options and quick entry points to the labour market.

Similarly, disadvantaged, special needs, rural, indigenous, ethnic and linguistic minorities and LGBTQI+ students are subject to life course accumulation of inequalities in both formal and informal education settings.

For example, students who live in rural areas often have to travel far to attend university, which can prove to be highly challenging. These students may have to miss out on opportunities, such as being on university sports teams and taking part in extra-curricular activities, which may increase the likelihood of them dropping out of studies.

For these students and all others, academic support across all levels of education and in informal and formal settings is necessary. More importantly, we need to provide pastoral support at institutional and classroom levels and dismantle stereotypes across all education, including in higher education.

Transforming and reinventing higher education

There was general agreement on “reinventing higher education” as also expressed in UNESCO’s Roadmap, which was launched at the conference.

In relation to equity in access and success in higher education, the roadmap document also asserted that they “cannot be seen as a luxury or an afterthought”.

Higher education admission policies, institutional cultures, classroom pedagogies and assessments as well as financing and governance should be transformed in order to embrace a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to learning, thereby fostering critical thinking, democratic values, peace and humanism.

It is obvious that we need to shift our four Ps: a concept that I created and proposed in my HED talk at the very beginning of the conference. Transforming higher education requires shifting our perceptions, practices, policies and participation in both financing and governance.

Perceptions of what is essential and valued and what is not in our societies need to shift away from a capitalist value system that has changed the meaning and role of higher education since the 1970s, as I argued in my recently published book.

Policies and practices also need to be transformed to embrace diversity, equality and equity over a life course through a multi-level and intersectional approach. Higher education research should light the way.

New learning models and open education platforms can help plug many of the gaps and inequalities that I mentioned above. However, the question of ethics, equity, equality, social justice and sustainable development need to be dealt with prior to opting for online provision or private provision or else we are doomed to see inequalities continuing to exist in both the physical and virtual worlds.

The final message of my talk was shared by many in the WHEC 2022 conference: to fix higher education, we need to fix inequalities.

Juliette Torabian is a postdoctoral fellow in sociology of education at the University of Luxembourg, deputy team leader in H2020 PIONEERED and a senior expert in international development and education. She is the author of the just released Wealth, Values, Culture and Education: Reviving the essentials for equality and sustainability, published by Springer.