**5. Facing crossroads in charting the future of higher education**

Throughout this text, three crossroads that higher education must face have been raised. The first referred to the access of the most disadvantaged economic sectors of the Latin American population to higher education, and the technological requirements derived from online professional training in times of pandemic. After living vast experiences of higher education in convulsive times – characterized by social protests and student strikes in the case of Latin America, and by the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus throughout the world, which have prevented the development of face-to-face teaching – information and communication technologies have been given a preponderant place in online professional training. At the time of writing, which is characterized by the partial control of the pandemic and the initial opening of universities, it may be propitious to reevaluate what has been experienced and to define edges that will allow us to outline the future of higher education.

One of the key elements to unravel is the subjective disposition, and diversity [46, 47], of teachers and students to continue in the future with face-to-face, online or hybrid higher education modalities. Considering that, as previously pointed out, then the use of various technological tools in the development of face-to-face professional training is unavoidable, if the aim is to broaden the social, cultural and symbolic capitals of students, in order to develop their self-learning skills.

On the other hand, the current convulsed times are also characterized by dystopian and retrotopian ideas of the future (and in the midst of which there are changes that are coming in the world of work – and in particular, professional work), and so there is consensus that higher education should focus on training professionals capable of facing the current trends of professional work, and in the creation of labor profiles increasingly tending to the knowmad.

Meanwhile, the structural de-qualification of degrees, which is evident in different Latin American countries, confronts the possibilities for professionals to experience their work with subjective wellbeing, and challenges higher education to train them to be able to perform in a working world that oscillates between a disciplinary paradigm, characterized by the application of normative devices, and one of performance, whose central premise is self-regulation.

These and other crossroads that the advances of societies are imposing on higher education require policies based on strategic visions that embrace the changes that are coming in relation to professional training for work, and with respect to the

*Crossroads of Higher Education in Troubled Times Facing the Future of Work and the Subjective… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99999*

ways in which higher education will face the multiple dimensions of its tasks. At the same time, such crossroads open up possibilities for the development of new professional skills that will make it possible to successfully navigate the contextual dynamics.

A likely skill to be worked on during professional training, and at the same time possible to be applied by those of us who are part of higher education in our respective countries, corresponds to the exercise of prognostic intelligence, as a rational policy for the future.

Sloterdijk [48], following Jean-Pierre Dupuy, argues that "only experienced apocalyptics can exercise a rational policy of the future, given that they are courageous enough to also consider the worst as a real possibility" (p. 15). This alludes to what Dupuy [49] called enlightened catastrophism, which consists of a new way of managing uncertainties and risks, resulting from assuming a final event as if it had already occurred.

It is then a matter of projecting ourselves through to the moment after the occurrence of an undesired event, looking back in the direction of our present, seeing in such an event a destiny, but a destiny that we may choose to discard while there is still time. In such a context, the ideas of uncertainties, risks, catastrophes and apocalypse change from a negative sense to a positive and socially useful one of predictive rationalism. Therefore, it is possible to argue that the idea of prognostic intelligence encompasses a greater dimension than the one proposed by these authors, since it can also incorporate the dimension of predictive rationalism, which predicts good things and not only apocalyptic events.

Prognostic intelligence corresponds to the exercise of a rational future policy. Therefore, it is different from the analysis through various forms of artificial intelligence, which, based on a set of data that allow the configuration of algorithms, can predict future behaviors or events. It is a skill that can be developed during professional training, to be put into practice in facing the crossroads of higher education; and, in the future, anticipating negative effects that may be generated from it, or enhancing the positive consequences that may arise from advantageous situations.

Thus, the positive or negative outcomes of online higher education, the way in which the future of work is shaped and its impact on professional practice, and the subjective well-being of future professionals are all susceptible to being addressed through prognostic intelligence.

The concept of prognostic intelligence involves a predictive rationalism, broader than classical philosophical rationalism, since it involves not only the use of reason modeled by experience to know a phenomenon, in the Kantian sense. Rather, it corresponds to thinking about a future apocalyptic or advantageous action, assuming that it has already happened, in order to analyze from there the sensitive, experiential and cognitive contents of professional life that have been affected (**Figure 2**).

The following scheme summarizes its components:

The sensible contents of professional life correspond both to subjectivities and to those that are experienced bodily, such as emotions and intuitions. The latter, in the sense proposed in Leibniz's humanistic philosophy. Here, intuition is based on an infinity of perceptions, which are not conscious, but are nevertheless part of our lived experiences as "sensations". Experiential contents, on the other hand, are those daily experiences that allow us to give meaning to the different aspects of professional life. Cognitive contents, in turn, correspond to the intellectualizations that are available in the cultural collections with which higher education is developed, and the subsequent labor exercise.

Prognostic intelligence could be put into practice during the formative process, analyzing the positive and negative consequences of online higher education in times of pandemic, the future of professional work, the possibilities for

**Figure 2.** *Source: Author, 2021.*

professionals to develop their tasks with increasing levels of subjective wellbeing, and the crossroads for higher education. This would also allow the development of this professional skill as a tool that professionals would have upon graduation from higher education. Where some will become responsible for the formation of new cohorts of their professions, or more broadly, of their professional areas, this tool will continue to be transmitted, thus becoming part of the professional ethos.

At the same time, the review of the consequences of an advantageous or apocalyptic event, taking into consideration all these types of contents of professional life, would make it possible to outline a future of higher education with greater possibilities of paying attention to the consequences of contextual events, opening up opportunities to embrace new ways of development.
