In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Resolution 70/1, Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This historic document lays out the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim to achieve sustainable development in three dimensions – social, economic and environmental, and ensure that every citizen of the planet can live a peaceful, prosperous and equitable life. As the then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon put it, “The 17 Sustainable Development Goals are our shared vision of humanity and a social contract between the world’s leaders and the people. They are a to-do list for people and planet, and a blueprint for success.” As part of its broad remit, the SDGs expanded the focus beyond primary and secondary education to include tertiary education. This was an important move suggesting that higher education is not only an important part of the quality education agenda – SDG 4 – but also a central pillar and key tool for the achievement of the full set of goals. Higher education is seen as playing a vital role in addressing the SDGs.
However, the world’s higher education is facing new realities and challenges, which seriously threaten the achievement of the SDGs. On the one hand, the global natural environment and socio-cultural environment are deteriorating; public emergencies represented by the COVID-19 pandemic have increased the uncertainty of social development. It is thus urgent for higher education systems to respond to these crises and enhance their resilience and capacity. On the other hand, the massification and diversification of higher education systems, along with internationalization and informatization, have created new and diverse forms of equity and quality issues. Higher education systems need to take into account the challenges and address them timely. Today, halfway to 2030, we have entered the critical period for reaching the SDGs. The question we need to address urgently is: How to reshape higher education systems and give full play to the role of higher education institutions, especially universities?
In this context, the theme of the International USR Summit 2024 will be “University Social Responsibility: Educational Transformation and Sustainable Development”.
Acknowledging a broad range of possible issues, the Summit is arranged along the lines of the below sub-themes: