The World View

International engagement provides valuable learning and research opportunities and important potential for mutual benefit to its participants. Most universities today opt to be internationally engaged despite the complications and risks. That said, they are not always adequately prepared.

Latin America — and its leading universities — are at a turning point, one that could usher in a new era of international collaboration, with wide-ranging implications for students, faculty and regional economies.

Notwithstanding a conventional narrative that reforms largely failed, I argue that they contributed significantly to much of what became and remains best about the region’s higher education.

Higher education throughout Latin America is in need of dramatic transformation.

Some progress has been made with regard to the number of women faculty, but the higher education sector still remains one of the areas where significant gender disparity exists.

New cadres are needed to run the economy and society, both of which are in acute need of modernization, but without new kinds of schools and universities this task will prove impossible.

University autonomy and academic freedom are essential if universities are to fulfill their social mission which is why public authorities must guarantee and promote respect for these prerogatives.

The need to attract international students and talent is particularly pressing in Japan where the birthrate is among the lowest in the world, leading to a shrinking youth population and demographic decline.