Not because the opportunity has disappeared, but because we continue to make decisions as if the context had not changed. Education, data, and development continue to advance on separate tracks. And while this happens, the conversation about quality will remain largely declarative. Because it is not enough to say that we are training well. It must be possible to demonstrate it. It must be possible to measure it. And, above all, that information must be used to make better decisions. It is not about pointing fingers. In recent years, I have had the opportunity to listen, compare, and observe what is happening in higher education throughout Latin America. Tensioned economies, governments containing spending, unstable political scenarios, and an international order that no longer responds to the rules of a decade ago. In that context, higher education ceases to be a protected space and becomes an observed, evaluated, and questioned system. And here appears a conversation that we still avoid but that is beginning to gain space: that of the productivity of higher education. One in which the university can redefine its role or let others do it for it. Not from conflict, but from irrelevance. Because the change is already underway. Technology is already in use. Students are already learning in a different way. The question is whether the university will be the protagonist of that transformation or if it will arrive late to explain it. And, in this context, arriving late is not an innocuous option. It is a decision. The author is a specialist in educational innovation and institutional transformation - CEO of SénecaLab. Not from easy criticism, but from a legitimate question: how well are we preparing our students for the world they will actually face? In Latin America —and particularly in economies like the Panamanian, strongly based on services and commerce— this question is even more urgent. It is that the world in which they are growing is teaching them another logic. At the same time, those of us who teach are not entirely clear where that world is heading. The university, in that sense, is reflecting something bigger: a global system that is also trying to understand itself. Many of the tasks that sustain employment today have a high risk of being automated in the short term. And yet, we continue to train based on assumptions that have not changed at the same pace as the environment. This is where, from my experience, I see the most critical point. It is not only that we must change what we teach. It is that we need to change how we are understanding education. For years we have repeated that the region has a historic opportunity to use technology and transform its educational systems. From Innkind FIEd, where we monitor conversations, decisions, and tensions in the sector in different countries, there is a feeling that is repeated too often: universities know that the world has changed, but they do not end up knowing how to respond to that change. It is not a lack of intention. It is cultural. We are facing a generation that learns differently, that consumes information in a fragmented way, and that has drastically reduced its ability to sustain attention in long processes. What used to take years to learn can now be resolved in minutes with a well-used tool. But the most complex challenge is not technological. It is in the hands of the students, in the productive processes, and in the way value is generated in almost all industries. Today, that statement is beginning to lose strength. Nor is it a lack of talent. It is, rather, the accumulation of several transformations that are happening at the same time and are overwhelming the traditional rhythms of education. On the one hand, artificial intelligence is no longer a future topic. And here appears a silent loss that should concern us more than we are willing to admit: the difficulty of dedicating time to learn in depth to then transform that learning into creation. It is not that students do not want to learn. It is about assuming that we are at a turning point. It is present.
