The World View

Education is education, and skills will come along with it, or are supplementary to it. The labor market changes so rapidly; thus people have to be trained for broader thinking in order to be adaptable.

Colombia has been on the path toward developing a sophisticated, diversified and equitable system of higher education for many years. This is promising but there are many shortcomings in policy and practice.

Increased international efforts generally lead to a recognition of the need for greater international visibility. An issue that regularly emerges is concern around the international section of the website. "It’s terrible!" people say.

The future of tertiary education will be significantly improved when the impermeable boundary between academic and vocational education that exists almost everywhere becomes more permeable and allows individuals to move back and forth across it.

The mergers and growing influence of the for-profit education sector fuels the ongoing concern over the quality provided by these giants.

While the first national excellence initiatives reflected a long-term national commitment to strengthen the contribution of tertiary education to economic development, the most recent wave seems to be stimulated by the perception of a competitive disadvantage as measured by the global rankings.

The cost of "reputational" damage in a globalized world is high. Cooperation between reputable institutions and those in corrupt countries is highly unlikely, thus sacrificing the potential for academic and research synergy.

When the quality of research and teaching are measured, the focus tends to be on individual performance — this ignores their fundamentally collective character.