This year, ESADE is celebrating its 60th anniversary. Throughout the 2018-2019 academic year, the school will mark this milestone with various events designed to promote reflection on the future of higher education and the challenges facing educational institutions like ESADE. 

Dating back to its founding in 1958, the history of ESADE has been shaped by the school’s innovative and global character. To commemorate this anniversary, the school will spend the coming year highlighting its six decades of experience, discussing the future of higher education and debating the role to be played by educational institutions. This reflection process will encourage the formulation of proposals in four areas – professional profile, technology, humanities and innovation – with the aim of tackling the future challenges of higher education. 

Professionals of the future 

Numerous studies and reports have suggested that a large percentage of the professions of the not-too-distant future have yet to be invented. If this is true, the companies and organisations of tomorrow will hire candidates whose profiles are very different from those currently being produced by universities and other higher education institutions. ESADE is committed to promoting reflection and debate with the aim of defining the high-demand professional profiles of the future. Even more importantly, we aim to suggest key changes that many higher education programmes need to implement in order to adapt to the new professional realities.

Impact of technological progress on higher education

Globalisation and the technological revolution have transformed most business models in virtually every field. The education sector is no exception, and as such, it is facing a large-scale transformation process. Throughout the coming academic year, ESADE will delve into the effects and consequences of the technology boom in higher education. Through debate and reflection, we will identify the main changes on the horizon and determine what impact online platforms, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and blockchain will have on the sector and how the user experience can be improved.

Training people with a critical spirit and values 

Technological change and social media use are creating new frameworks for thought and interpersonal relations, giving rise to new proposals with an immediate and easy-to-understand impact. Content that goes into greater depth and requires slower digestion tends to be relegated to the background. Nevertheless, training people who are capable of understanding a complex, fast-changing world, building within it their life’s work, and adding value to organisations and society requires that we strengthen our educational commitment to fostering critical thinking and conveying solid, coherent values. ESADE’s aim is to explore the content, forms and times of these models.

Educational innovation to meet educational needs 

Throughout the coming academic year, ESADE will encourage reflection on the main lines of educational innovation and the methodologies capable of achieving the best results. The educational institutions that manage to innovate and create learning experiences that are more interactive, participatory, interdisciplinary and tech-supported – experiences that combine face-to-face and digital elements and provide a successful journey from theory to practice – are the institutions that will be best equipped to respond to these new needs. 

#ReadySteady60 campaign

As a means of sharing reflections and proposals in the aforementioned areas, ESADE has created a dedicated web site that will feature further details, including up-to-the-minute information on all the events organised as part of the school’s #ReadySteady60 campaign.