Expanding student access key to achieving the SDGs – Reimers

Broadening access to university – especially for students from diverse or disadvantaged backgrounds – does not just help more people attend university. It also enhances the quality and transformative potential of the education itself, for everyone involved, says Professor Fernando Reimers of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

“It probably would be incomplete to think that universities could contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals if they did not, at the same time, become more inclusive,” he told University World News.

Reimers, born and raised in Venezuela, is Ford Foundation Professor of the Practice of International Education at Harvard University, where he has worked for three decades. He founded and leads the Global Education Innovation Initiative and is an expert on education policy, global education, and more latterly on education and sustainability.

We spoke on Memorial Day, during Harvard’s commencement week. The administration of United States President Donald Trump was talking about blocking Harvard’s ability to enrol international students, which happened soon thereafter.

Reimers had seen the writing on the wall, or at least in Project 2025, the document that outlines the Republicans’ ideological platform, with its nationalist view of policy. Realising that it could become difficult to bring foreign students to Harvard, he developed an online version of his highly successful masters programme in international education, policy and management.

It is launching now, providing an alternative access route for international students. “For an educator, it gives a lot of food for thought on how poor a job we have done in educating the population that elected an autocrat,” he said. “And there are real consequences to that.”



Connecting ESD with student access and success

During the conversation Reimers explored connections between Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) – a growing movement globally – and another key focus of higher education: improving access and success.

He came up with three main ways in which expanding student access and success in higher education is tied to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The first connection is the SDGs themselves, in that they include, for instance, improving education and ending poverty. One of the targets for the goals is providing more access to education. “So obviously, increasing access to higher education is consistent with the SDGs,” Reimers said.

A second connection comes from investigating synergies between enrolling different groups of people and achieving the SDGs. “To answer a more complex aspect of the question; if there is a way in which universities can open the doors to higher education to groups previously denied access, this might help us to approach sustainability more effectively and creatively,” he said.

One of the premises of opening access for people from the most disadvantaged communities in society would be that education is not only helping those individuals have greater opportunities themselves, “but would also empower them as leaders of communities to take the knowledge and skills they have gained to improve those communities they understand well”.

Reimers illustrated this with an example. Many universities worldwide admit only students from the wealthier 20% of income distribution. “You can teach those fairly privileged students to think about poverty and inequality and sustainability, and you can get them to do good things.

“But the result would likely be qualitatively different to the impact of diversifying the student body to take less privileged students from the very same communities that need to be transformed in order to achieve the SDGs.

“Those things are synergistic. Expansion in access to a university offers a more transformative education,” said Reimers.

A third connection – remodelling higher education

A third connection could prompt a rethink of the model of higher education. For instance, the higher education model in the US is very expensive. “That’s one of the reasons we have not further expanded access.”

The question is, is there an alternative? “If you’re serious about expanding access, maybe you have to think differently about the kinds of policies and programmes that are most effective to expand access.”

In the US, higher education access expanded significantly between World War II and the 1980s. But for the last few decades the country has been investing a lot less in public higher education. While the US used to lead the world in access, the leader now is South Korea. Policies and programmes matter.

There are also questions around who is being trained for what. Reimers argues that it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense, for example, to train many doctors to work in hospitals in areas where most people see community health workers. “Should universities be developing and prioritising programmes for community health workers?”

But such propositions face serious resistance. “It’s a hard sell. There are very powerful mental models of what a university should be and what education looks like, that act as blinders. They make it very difficult for us to recognise different training as a legitimate university education.”

Reimers wrote a paper about what universities are doing about climate change, which flowed from a committee he was on at Harvard, set up to design a strategy for the university to address climate change. After a year of deliberations, the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability was created as a hub for climate research, education and action.

“I said, should we look at what other universities are doing?” But the committee felt that what other universities were doing was not very relevant unless they were Yale or Stanford. “I don’t necessarily think that Stanford, Yale or Harvard are the most innovative places in terms of thinking about how the university can address change,” said Reimers.

Studying higher education and the SDGs

But there are many other universities interested in innovation – “in thinking differently about how to get the university to be relevant to the needs of society with the resources and constraints that they have,” Reimers said.

“The SDGs in particular offer a way to think about that. My sense is that many universities in the Global South have embraced the SDGs as a way to think differently about the role of higher education.” Even though the SDGs are as relevant to people of Boston as to people in Rio de Janeiro.

Reimers studied the Times Higher Education database of some 2,400 universities worldwide who self-report on what they are doing with the SDGs. “Obviously, these are self-reports so you have to take them with a grain of salt. But they’re one of the most comprehensive databases to get a sense of what’s happening. I dug in.”

He identified universities that looked promising and contacted them directly, and produced another paper. “What I concluded is that there are universities that don’t necessarily have a lot of marquee value, who are not very well known, who are doing very interesting things made visible by that database.”

One was Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, another was Amrita University in India. Both are private institutions with reputations for quality.

“Harvard would never think of Tec de Monterrey as being in the same league as we are. But what they’re doing in terms of using sustainability to drive processes of transformation of the university is both more ambitious and probably more impactful than anything that we are doing.”

In India, Amrita University is placing students – across all fields of study – for a period in a low-income community, mostly rural, given where they are.

“What they do is not just service in the traditional sense. They try to understand life in the community, and what needs are there. And then they design, in partnership with community members, ways in which to improve circumstances. It seems to me that Amrita is doing the right thing, engaging students and faculty in recognising what the needs are around it,” Reimers said.

“I think that the SDGs are giving universities around the world a language, a way of thinking that can help them innovate in the direction of becoming more relevant to the needs of society. But it’s also a language that can help universities talk to one another and learn from one another.”

Reimers looked for analogies in the history of higher education, and came up with the creation of the modern university in Berlin in 1810: “The idea of the modern research university, and the idea of a liberal arts education, became a unifying language for transformation of higher education.

“With the SDGs, I think it’s happening much faster.”

Some big challenges for sustainability in higher education

So what are the big challenges for higher education in advancing sustainability? One is the rigid mindset in higher education, of not learning from people who are in different circumstances. Another is that the current model of higher education is seen as the gold standard, and so messing with it is resisted.

Is there also a challenge of scale? “Universities, even the smallest ones, are large and complex institutions and producing change in not easy, right?”

Reimers works with universities around the world on strategy. In terms of the SDGs, a big challenge is devising a process that is inclusive enough so that the strategy is not seen as just coming from the vice-chancellor; rather, it means something to most people.

He cited the expression, “culture eats strategy for breakfast” – however well crafted a strategy is, it will fail without a supportive organisational culture. “I guess that’s the challenge here. Cultures in institutions that run for a long time and that are large are very powerful indeed, and hard to change.”

However, crises in and outside the university can overcome challenges of change, said Reimers, forcing institutions to rethink. He used the example of COVID-19, which sparked the mass movement of higher education worldwide online, within weeks and months.

Now, with higher education facing a crisis of legitimacy, Reimers sees more disruption ahead. He believes that external crises – for example of climate change, of democracy, of very resilient inequality, perhaps of wars – and internal ones such as lack of funding and public trust, will increasingly force universities to think anew.

“Crises are going to cause university leaders, administrators and faculty to realise that it can’t be business as usual. Crises push institutions to innovate in ways they’ve resisted for decades. If we’re serious about the SDGs, we must rethink who our students are, how we educate them, and what purpose higher education serves,” said Reimers.