The UNESCO World Higher Education Conference 2022 opened this week in Barcelona in Spain, reaffirming the importance of higher education as a public good and a human right, and underlining the need to promote local and global equity of university access.
UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay pointed to major transformations of higher education since the previous UNESCO world higher education conferences in 1998 and 2009, noting a doubling in the number of students enrolled in the past two decades – to 235 million students – and this number is likely to double again over the coming decade.
International mobility is progressing even faster, Azoulay said in her speech opening the three-day conference on 18 May. The number of students pursuing studies outside their country of origin has almost tripled over the past 20 years to reach six million today, and is expected to be eight million by 2025.
But even with the progress in the past two decades, numbers in higher education are still lagging in developing countries, with just 10% of young people accessing higher education compared to 79% in some richer countries. At the same time inequalities are increasing.
“Immense progress has also been made in terms of equality between men and women, to the point that in 2020 there are 113 women enrolled in higher education for every 100 men in the world,” she said. Sub-Saharan Africa is lagging as the only region where there are fewer female than male students in university.
But she also pointed to profound disparities between disciplines: on average worldwide, only one in three engineering students is a woman.
Azoulay noted: “We are facing a real challenge to ensure that education remains a common public good, accessible to all. This presupposes public investments commensurate with the expansion of the student population and its mobility.”
However, resources are poorly distributed and inequalities are increasing: “Public spending per student has increased only in Europe and North America as well as in East and Southeast Asia; in all other regions, it has decreased,” she said.
“UNESCO is based on this ideal and on the conviction that higher education is not and should not become a privilege, but is an integral part of the fundamental right to education,” the director general said.