Raquel Bernal Salazar

Interview

Q/ The region has made progress in its development, but incompletely. In particular, poverty and inequality levels are still very high. How do you assess the progress and pending challenges in terms of poverty and inequality reduction in Latin America and the Caribbean in the last decades?

I believe that in the last two decades, prior to the pandemic, the region had made significant progress in terms of poverty, extreme poverty and levels of inequality, which, by the way, is the most serious problem we have in the region. Then the pandemic hit, as a consequence of the policies that were adopted in the region, all the benefits that we had achieved in the last two decades were practically erased. So, in the Latin American region, during the period of the pandemic, school closures lasted an average of 170 days. The global average of the number of days of closures in educational institutions in the rest of the world was 40. So, 170 versus 40 implies, according to Unesco, that approximately 60 % of the children in the Latin American region lost a full school year. In other words, we are once again at very complicated levels of inequality. This happened in all sectors, because the activity closures were not only in schools and this again had very strong implications on poverty, extreme poverty and inequality. It had a special impact on women and young children with everything that happened during the policies that were put in place to deal with the pandemic.

I believe that the pandemic was a very big shock that in Latin America had a more serious impact than in other parts of the world because of the policies that were adopted, which brought us back to very complex levels of inequality and poverty. Again, the most unequal region in the world and Colombia, perhaps the most unequal country in the world. Then, we had done well with programs such as conditional transfers and the increase in school coverage, and all that was undone as a consequence of the pandemic.

Q/ We know that early childhood is a fundamental stage for the subsequent development of people and the reduction of inequality gaps. How do you evaluate the progress made by the region in terms of social protection policies aimed at this key group?

I begin my answer by reiterating that I believe that investing in early childhood is the best investment any government can make. I am now running a university and I get to advocate for higher education, but I really, wholeheartedly believe that if I had the money, I would invest it all in early childhood.

Where are we in Latin America? The vast majority of countries in the region have already defined very specific early childhood initiatives, strategies or programs. I think this is very important, because a decade ago, early childhood did not really exist in this region, so this is already a first step.

Coverage continues to be relatively low: between 35 and 40 % of children in the region are served in some early childhood early education initiative. And the big problem in the region continues to be the issue of quality in early education, since coverage without quality is an unfulfilled promise in the early development of children. With the exception of Chile, perhaps, which is the country that has been in place the longest, in most of the other countries we have policies that are approximately a decade old. I think it has been very important for the region to be aware of the importance of investing in early childhood, that is, from zero to six years of age.

The region has been very cohesive around this, which I believe is a great added value, something that has not happened at other educational levels. The countries of Latin America work together to design policies and exchange good practices regarding the implementation of early childhood programs. Also, there is a great social agreement around early childhood, and civil society groups are also part of this, which is something that did not happen with primary and secondary education in Latin American countries. So, civil society and parents have been called upon, there is a much greater awareness of the importance of this, but we still have a long way to go. Especially because the budgets allocated in Latin America for investment in early childhood education are still very low and we see in the region a tendency to increase investment in higher education, perhaps to the detriment of education prior to higher education, and this could be a threat in the coming years for early childhood.

Q/ Considering the available evidence, what are, in your opinion, the most effective interventions to improve the quality of early childhood education and care in the Latin American context?

The quality of early education has some particularities that are slightly different from the quality at other educational levels. In early education we talk a lot about the importance of classroom interactions. Initial education is not about spilling knowledge on children, as perhaps happens in higher education, but about interactions that promote exploration, play, creativity. So an interaction is, for example, taking the children out into the garden to dig for worms. These interactions are different from sitting at a desk, writing letters, coloring things with certain types of colors; they are more about exploration and learning through play. And that has been difficult in the region, because early education emerged after we were already used to the rest of education, where the standard is to sit the student at a table, look at the board and learn what the teacher is transmitting.

We still have a long way to go on quality issues in terms of what is done during the school day, how much we talk to the children, how much vocabulary is promoted to them. The idea is always to counter-question. Stimulating vocabulary through art is also a way of trying to trigger the main functions of the brain. So, what one must achieve between zero and five years of age is that children learn to learn, that they become creative, that they know how to approach resources, that they have a very enriched vocabulary and this will later allow them to build the rest of the learning they need for life. In essence, achieving this quality is what has been difficult

The research that I have done in Colombia, above all, but also in other parts of Latin America, refers to some basic points for this to work well. The first thing is that initial education programs have very specific curricula, very prescriptive, with clear learning results designs. That doesn’t always happen. Teachers, in most countries, are given total autonomy to design what they do in the classroom and how to do it, and I think that has been problematic. The second thing, and this is no surprise because it happens at all levels of education, is teacher training and professional development. In this case, there is a need for training that is special, I reiterate, because what happens in early education is different from what happens in the rest of the educational levels. The wellbeing of teachers also turns out to be very important; if the teacher is not well, if he/she is anxious, if he/she has job burnout, it can be very bad for the learning of young children. And perhaps the other thing I would say is that quality is not in the buildings, it is not in the fact that the child development center is very nice, that it has a great cafeteria, but in the quality of the teachers, in the training and the professional support they receive.

Q/ In your opinion, where have policies aimed at training human capital failed during the last decades, and what policies could be implemented in the future to bring about a substantial transformation in human capital formation in the region in the short and medium term?

Before thinking about education and human capital policies, Latin American countries have a serious problem and that is the lack of clarity in the productive projects that we are looking for. What does a country like Colombia want to do? We want to be the country, perhaps, of green energies, of nearshoring, the country where biodiversity can be monetized. Then, when a country understands its productive project, it can organize all the policies to make it work well. This is a first point and it does not happen in most Latin American countries, with a few exceptions. When you understand the project you want, then you design or implement policies in the sectors according to that, and that includes the human capital sector.

In this way, with the clarity that the country is looking for a certain north, the educational institutions could align themselves to train people who have the competencies for the country to be productive along the lines proposed, and I believe that this is the first shortcoming. The second is that educational institutions have not worked closely with the economic sectors of our countries, especially the universities. Universities decide unilaterally what young people should know and what careers we should offer, without consulting the industrial and agricultural sectors, etc.

I think that from now on we should have a better interaction to understand the country, how it is characterized in its occupational scale, which are the sectors that have priority, which have potential and talk to them: what is the type of person you need, what are the competencies that are required at this time? Especially in times of so much change, with artificial intelligence, with the fourth industrial revolution, and that universities are more willing to engage in this dialogue to train the skills, the people and the characteristics that we need so that countries can grow better.

The fourth thing, perhaps, is related to young people. They are now very different from us. We studied a career, an undergraduate degree that was perhaps four to six years, which lasted us 25 years of working life, that is, the obsolescence of our higher education was more or less 25 years. Young people now, because knowledge is evolving so fast, if we have them in college in a four-year undergraduate, the obsolescence of that education is six or seven years. So, they are really facing a world that is very different. How is the university going to react to that. That’s an important question. I believe that the way to deliver education is going to be more along life; I invite a young student to come to the university, I provide him with some basic competences, then that person goes to work for a while and then returns to the university: what I liked most is nature or machines or the human being, and we are going to specialize him along life, because in any case we are all going to be learning all the time. And we are not understanding that young people have different projects and purposes in life, especially these new young people of generation Z, generation Alpha.

I believe that young people no longer dream of a life of working in a multinational for 30 years; on the contrary, they want a fluid, dynamic life, they like to learn, to be moving from place to place, learning different types of occupations throughout their lives, and we have not understood this well in the educational systems. I think that needs to be incorporated in a better way. And young people, some may want to be doctors, lawyers, but now we have many who used to be doctors and lawyers who actually wanted to be music producers, chefs, film cameramen, and those projects we are not taking care of well. So, in Latin America, I think we should pay much more attention to technical, vocational, technological education, because young people also want to do other kinds of things in life, especially with this need they have for a more fluid and more dynamic life, in which they are constantly learning. I could stay here for a long time telling you about the challenges that higher education faces, but I believe that there is much, much that we should be doing differently in order to help people to have relevant life projects in a permanently changing world that is moving too fast and that we must be prepared to assume with resilience, with the ability to learn to learn, with the ability to adapt continuously to what is coming.

Q/ In your opinion, what are the most promising policies for expanding access to quality higher education for disadvantaged students in Latin America and the Caribbean?

The first thing is to guarantee financing for students, both in public and private universities. These financing funds could be constituted by national and local governments, universities, the private sector and perhaps even with the help of multilaterals, who can offer guarantees for this type of loan. What has typically worked in other countries is the Income Contingent Loan, i.e., the student is trained for free and repays when he/she already has a job. Another way could be to assist students through paths other than the professional one: technical, technological, short-cycle flexible learning or certification of competencies, so that people can build a profile of competencies with the financial capacity they have at that moment.

It is very important that high quality universities are present in the territories. I believe that one difficulty in Latin America is that the big capitals have high quality universities, but there are very large regional gaps. This happens in countries like Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador, and in Central America. So, I believe that in the digital era, high quality universities will be able to offer content if the countries guarantee very high quality connectivity, even if they are not physically located in all parts of the country. I think this is a very important issue. In this region, especially, some people are very afraid of online education. I think this has great potential because we are already talking about higher education. We are talking about adults who really want to get ahead, who are looking for a better opportunity in their lives, who are willing to learn even if it is behind a screen, if the content is of the highest quality and if this is reflected in greater employability. I believe that this is a role that universities in our countries, especially in Latin America, must play.

Q/ Regarding financial barriers, what models of financing higher education for these groups have proven to be most effective, and how can we address the financial risk for low-income families to invest in higher education, especially considering the uncertainty of the labor market?

Financing is the great challenge for access and impact of higher education in Latin America. In Latin America and in the world, in fact, higher education is expensive. This is not because universities want to make money, it is because high quality education is expensive. So, professors with PhDs, high quality laboratories and technological infrastructure cost a lot. And in these countries we have a huge population of young people in conditions of socioeconomic vulnerability. In Colombia alone, we have close to three million young people who neither study nor work. This means 28 % of all young people between the ages of 18 and 24. Imagine that, these young people in 10 years will represent a cohort, a generation of young people without hope, without future, then, democracy is totally unfeasible with such a perspective.

How to finance them? That is the question. Because, in addition, in the context of many Latin American countries, coverage was expanded without much care for quality. This, by construction, is a decrease in quality, because a professor cannot attend 120 students well, when before he only attended 60. And this increased coverage without quality is very dangerous for the countries because we are not fulfilling the promise to these young people. Later, they are going to graduate, they are not going to find jobs or the salaries they expected and I believe that this great frustration is very worrying for democracies. The issue of financing is extremely critical. I believe that it is possible -and the countries have been slow in doing this- to establish financing funds for higher education with contributions from all sectors. I mean that the government and the universities should contribute, and that the private sector, which is the beneficiary of young people graduating from higher education, should also contribute. And surely the multilaterals, including the CAF, the World Bank and the IDB, could provide guarantees for these investment funds.

What happened in developed countries 20 years ago, including Great Britain and Australia, is that financing funds were established and lent as income-contingent credit. This is also called shared income, which means that the young person does his or her degree completely free of charge and when he or she has his or her first job, he or she repays the debt of the degree that was financed. This income-contingent credit requires the student, when he/she is already employed, to repay a fraction of his/her salary. This will not always mean that they will repay 100 % of their loan, but it implies that there is a return to the fund that will be able to finance other students in the future. That has been a very successful formula in many parts of the world. I believe this is viable. There are at this moment some governments in the region that ideologically and politically consider that the State is the one that has to guarantee the fundamental right to education. I believe that this is not necessarily the right way to go, because we could all contribute to educate millions of young people in the region who currently do not have access to quality education.

The other thing is that, I reiterate, not everyone has to be a professional. I think there are a lot of young people in the region who want to have other types of jobs that could be offered through vocational, technical and technological education. And, thirdly, I am also very convinced that in these times of rapid change, what I call «flexible learning trajectories» will be very important. In other words, I do not really believe that if we need to improve the employability of young people and therefore their quality of life, we all need to have degrees. I think we are going to be able to acquire competencies in something I also call «short pathway modules». Here we are doing it in this university, as they are educational modules of six or eight months, where we train people who can be cybersecurity, full stack or software programming operators. So, people can do small educational modules, improve their economic conditions and their quality of life, and that allows them to acquire more education. If that education can then be stacked, can be added, eventually, people could end up with degrees, but it can be done little by little, as people improve their conditions with skills that universities are offering them.

Q/ The skills of the future, the digital transformation, are producing profound changes in the structure of economies and the nature of tasks within jobs. How do you see the degree of preparation of the workforce in the region to adapt, and what actions can be implemented in education systems to close the gaps between the skills and knowledge imparted and those demanded by the productive sector in the face of these changes?

The fourth industrial revolution and the introduction of generative artificial intelligence have overwhelmed us, and this has fundamentally changed the way we work, how we live together and how we manage our personal lives, in other words, everything. And universities, the entire education system, are responsible for training the people who will live in this world that is structurally different from the one we teachers live in. It is an immense challenge, first of all. I am convinced that, despite so much technology, artificial intelligence and the way it transforms us, what will continue to be totally important in the future, and perhaps even more so, are transversal competencies, because it is really going to be very difficult to keep up with so much technology, and how fast it is going to come out. And within these enduring competencies, I think that one of the most important will be learning to learn, that is, I will be able to update myself from now on, even if knowledge moves too fast; creativity, I think that will be very important, because human creativity is what will multiply if one leverages well on artificial intelligence. You need to be very creative for artificial intelligence to be really useful. Resilience and adaptability will also be important, because the world and the uncertain future are going to be painful and scary. I think we have to train not only young people but all people to resist this uncertain world and the fear that it is going to give, with these transversal, enduring competencies, as they call them. Of course, people had to be trained in technological issues. What I think we should do, rather than putting a course on artificial intelligence in every undergraduate course, is that we should all be more digitally minded. What does that mean in my mind? The first thing is that we all need to know how to use data intelligently. So, typically everyone at work, personally, we all made decisions kind of by intuition. I think now there is so much data that you can make better decisions if you know how to read it intelligently, if you know how to interpret the statistics that they give you to understand, for example, that my health is like this. So, sometimes, what I do is that I put the medical exams into the artificial intelligence and I know more or less how to measure some of the things that afflict me, and I think that this kind of thing you have to learn how to do.

Second, continuous experimentation, because people, organizations, democracies, are going to have to evolve constantly. Companies already do this well, educational institutions not so much yet, and perhaps we do it very badly because we are very traditional, very rigid, we move slowly. So, I think that continuous experimentation in educational models, in how we are going to teach, to attract new students, to attend young people who otherwise would not have come here, that agile experimentation we will have to do. And the third thing is to teach everyone how to work collaboratively. I believe that in this uncertain future we are not going to make it alone. The future of the climate crisis, the fragility of democracy, global migrations, we are going to solve them alone as a group, interdisciplinary and with many allies. People do not know how to work in groups. Working collaboratively is another very painful thing, but I think it will be indispensable in the future.

Notice that what I am mentioning are more of the usual things, but deepened, and not so much technological issues. Surely, in order to take advantage of the opportunities that artificial intelligence brings, we are all going to have to be digitally literate. And I use the word literate because I don’t think we should be experts, but literate is, at least, knowing how to read and write, the same, but digitally. So, I, at least, understand what a large language model is, what an artificial intelligence hallucination is, I know how to write a well-done question to artificial intelligence, what they call prompting. There are some minimum things that we all should know, that at the moment we do not know, and I think that universities have the responsibility to go out and teach emergency literacy to many people so that this digital divide is not created, which would generate more inequality than this region already has. I think the challenges are entertaining, sometimes scary, but universities have a great role to play here and we must all be together, innovating and working towards the future that awaits humanity.

Q/ Given the budgetary constraints faced by many countries in the region, what would be, in your opinion, the priority investments to maximize the impact of policies for human capital formation, especially in the most vulnerable groups?

Initial education is the investment priority and should also be in Latin American countries if we really want human capital to be of high quality and, therefore, have an impact on our growth and equity. The good thing about this investment is that if you invest in young children, the gaps between the most and the least vulnerable do not emerge. So, you are not trying to reduce them, but rather you are addressing them, preventing them from emerging. So it is very efficient for that reason: from a very young age I am already managing to equalize them, to balance them, regardless of the type of home they were born in, whether in a vulnerable home or in a more privileged one. It seems to me that this is a 10 out of 10 winner all around, because you are not trying to close gaps if they are not opened. If we wait until later, it’s much more costly and difficult to close them, so I think this is a very cost-effective investment.

I think technology will be useful in the future to close those gaps. In the pandemic, we were left with a lot of learning gaps because, as I mentioned, almost 60 % of the children in Latin America are estimated to have lost a full year of education. So, the gaps that are continuing to the next levels of education are tremendous. The students we receive post-pandemic have a very large knowledge gap, and it has been very difficult for the universities to try to catch them up. In the same way, this is happening all over the world, but especially in Latin America, I repeat, because here the handling of the pandemic was different and I believe that technology will help us a lot, because through artificial intelligence we can leverage adaptive learning. What is adaptive learning? It is that each student learns at his or her own pace and with what he or she brings. So, if I am trying to pass the precalculus course but I don’t know how to factor, the algorithm will take me through all the exercises I need until I know how to factor to move up to the next module, and so I don’t have to be in a class of 80 students trying to learn how to factor when everyone else already knows. I think this will help us a lot to reduce learning gaps in vulnerable populations to at least have them leveled and have the opportunity to reach quality higher education, which will not happen if we don’t do it.

It is very important, I reiterate, that universities fulfill the promise that students will have a better life as a consequence of having graduated from a university. This requires that we work a lot on employability issues: to be closer to the productive sectors, that learning is much more practical, almost like a dual learning in collaboration with the economic sectors and the university. I believe that the teaching of knowledge is something we must rethink because information is already free on the networks. If you want to learn about quantum physics, calculus, inequality, everything is on the net. So, in the university, what do we contribute? I believe that we contribute in how to manage information, how to cure the information that is in all the networks, how to learn to learn from that information, how to systematize it. And, I reiterate, the transversal competencies, critical thinking, ethics, citizenship, social commitment, etc. Technology will help us, but it has its limits. Transversal competencies become very important, technology will help us to reduce the gaps. And finally, we must work in close collaboration with the sectors so that the students we are training have a future, a better quality of life and the hope of always being able to improve if they continue to learn with high quality.