No. 14 (8): Higher Education Policy. January-June 2017

The profound transformations the world has witnessed in the last three decades have not left any of the many spaces or dimensions that make up our present societies untouched, and have confronted governments and societies with the urgent need to develop different instruments, strategies and policies to cope with the changes without succumbing to their turbulences.

These transformations have had a particular impact on higher education, which has been tasked with the responsibility of providing societies with resources to deal efficiently with the new challenges and make them viable in an increasingly open world. In this context, higher education has occupied a rather paradoxical position: being affected by the changes of the modern world and, simultaneously, having to offer tools to cope with such metamorphoses.

This explains, to some degree, the many transformations or attempts of transformation there have been in the field of higher education worldwide, which have concerned the different dimensions that form part of it, especially the area of public policies, conceived as instruments to activate mechanisms of change. Thus, the instrumentation of public policies to attend to the many problematic areas of higher education is an issue that has occupied scholars, decision makers, national and international advisors, government officials, civil organization, etc., for the last two or three decades. If anything is certain nowadays, it is that we live and will continue to live in an ever more changing and ever more unpredictable world. Nevertheless, we must act as if we understood the direction of the changes and were able to trace their course, knowing full well that we do not actually possess the instruments needed to foresee the future. This is one of the great paradoxes of our time, one that every public decision made in any domain has to grapple with, imprinting it with a guesswork quality and confronting us with the same problems over and over again.

Issue cordinators: Nayeli Quevedo Huerta, Ducange Médor and Beatríz Adriana Bustos Torres