“We must try to give more opportunities in higher education to those who have less”

“We must try to give more opportunities to those who have less (…) Some people will never have the academic merit that others have, but they also deserve to be able to exercise, at some point, the right to have a complete education: a lifelong perspective”, said the director of UNESCO IESALC, in an interview with the Bolivian newspaper El Deber, stressing that beyond merit, UNESCO is committed to the universal right to higher education.

Pedró said that higher education in Latin America and the Caribbean has had a very important quantitative growth in recent years, both in terms of participation and supply. However, there are quality problems, reflected in the fact that only one out of every two students who enter higher education completes their studies due to multiple factors, including economic ones.

Those students in the highest quintile are seven times more likely to access higher education than those in the lowest quintile, in part because of the design of the system, which in some cases has served to perpetuate the differences.

He also cited young people’s perception of the interest, relevance or pertinence of university studies. “They are not convinced that the effort they are going to make will pay off in the long term”.

He also stressed the need for the public and private systems to work together to take advantage of the differences, turning them into opportunities for collaboration: “We all win if we add up”.

Another aspect to improve is international mobility, as less than one out of every one hundred higher education students in Latin America benefits from international mobility opportunities.

Watch the interview here