IN BAJA CALIFORNIA, AT AN EDUCATIONAL CROSSROADS

The pandemic has proven to be a cyclical crisis, and organizations have responded in different stages reflecting these cycles. In higher education, colleges and universities have now undergone two of three stages coined by Henry Stoever, president of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. The first was the emergency stage, in which institutions devoted their attention to adjusting as quickly as possible. Next was the transition stage in which people more or less adapted to those adjustments. But the pandemic is a long-term crisis and, moreover, it is intersecting with other problems such as supply chain disruptions, political upheavals and climate change.

There is therefore an important third stage that institutions must not skip. Today’s students are entering complex, global societies with problems that won’t be solved by outdated modes of thinking and problemsolving. Higher education must use this opportunity to undergo a period of deep introspection and innovation.

This is the transformation stage, where all institutions must eventually be, to equip students for the challenges that lie ahead.

Each crisis can prepare us for the next one. In April 2010, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake rocked Baja California, where our university, Centro de Enseñanza Técnica y Superior (CETYS), is located. The event made us realize the ever-present possibility of disruptions and that we needed to make our institution ready for the future, so we initiated a 10-year plan, CETYS 2020. One of the changes was an added focus on digital literacy, and we started a mandatory requirement for all students to take at least 10 percent of their program through online classes as a way to acclimate them in case there was ever a time we had to partially or fully switch to an online format.

Now, just like then, it is important to think about possible future disruptions.

While it is impossible to predict everything, the world itself provides clues about how we can strengthen certain foundations. What happened in 2010 positioned us to implement CETYS Flex 360 to cope with the pandemic. We know how internationalized and interdependent the world is. Due to this interdependence, a localized crisis can have far-reaching repercussions.

To better prepare, we have placed an increasing emphasis on transnational education and working with borderless professors to help students develop greater international awareness and skills.

In the same way, institutions can use the pandemic as an opportunity to prepare for whatever may lie ahead. These are the issues that my colleagues in the international higher education community and I discussed at a recent conference for the International Association of University Presidents and I invite other colleges and universities to undergo similar processes of their own.

There is a tendency to approach innovation from a purely technological standpoint. Certainly, technology is part of innovation, but it is not everything. The current challenges we face require higher education institutions to innovate so as to equip students to meet those challenges.

Everywhere we turn, the pressing problems of our day — be it the pandemic, climate change or cyberterrorism — underscore how interconnected our world is and the need for international cooperation. Borderless professors, internationalization without travel, greater diversity and inclusion — these kinds of innovations, working in tandem with technology, can fill the gap of global awareness in higher education.

Higher learning must also develop the whole individual. This means looking beyond academics and cultivating students’ emotional, physical and ethical development. It means having them engage with questions of what it means to be a citizen of today’s world.

There is a growing recognition that social impact should be factored into the ranking of colleges and universities just as much as academics and research. The Times Higher Education’s Impact Rankings reflect this perceptual shift, and institutions would do well to keep up. At CETYS, for example, we are embedding a select number of the United Nations’s Sustainable Development Goals into the heart of CETYS 2036, our next stage of development.

Technological innovations made it possible for institutions to get through the emergency and transition stages. But moving forward, it is the transformation stage where schools must eventually be. The challenges that lie ahead are not just structural. They are existential.

How will institutions remain resilient in the face of future disruptions? How will they prepare students to thrive in an era of growing complexity?

These are the questions we must answer now, not later, while we still have momentum.

León-García