**1. Introduction**

The effects of massification, fragmentation, and segmentation of higher education have been exacerbated by convulsions, be these from COVID-19, social uprisings and political transformations in some Latin American countries, forcible technological disruptions in professional work, or any of the many looming changes in the future of professional work. A sense of existential insecurity, a fear of the future, has come to light for professionals and represents a crossroads in higher education that must be addressed in order to maintain its relevance, quality and stability.

First, higher education is going through massification processes, evidenced by increased gross enrollment rate – worldwide, from 19% in 2000, to 38% in 2018 [1]. In Latin America, this phenomenon began in the 1990s with the liberalization of the supply of professional training and the novel coexistence of public and private higher education regulated by the market and competition. This resulted in increased coverage in Latin America and the Caribbean by 29 percentage points between 2000 and 2018, compared to the 22 points in Europe and North America and 30 in East and Sub-East Asia during the same period [1]. The Chilean case has become a paradigm in the liberalization of higher education, leading fragmentation in many professions, reserving university status only for some and relegating still others to professional institutes (IP) – the latter of which grant professional degrees, but not bachelor's. Furthermore, specialized training offered at technical training centers (*centros de formación técnica*, CFT) around operational professions has also increased. As a result, the expansion of higher education in Latin America has developed in a segmented manner. In other words, people from certain socioeconomic strata have priority access to certain types of institutions, and, therefore, occupy work positions that are also differentiated with respect to the material and symbolic valuations of work tasks in the national socio-professional pyramid [2, 3]. Thus, the social inequalities that characterize the continent are also reproduced in this sense, calling into question the impact of "universal access to higher education" ([1]: 8) on development in these countries.

In various Latin American territories, higher education is aspirational to the middle socioeconomic strata; its contributions, however, to the personal and social development and progress is subject of sustained public debates regarding its definition as a universal human right or, on the contrary, as a consumer good. This is further occurring in the midst of the "structural de-qualification of qualifications" ([4]: 40), in which professionals are "destined to obtain from their qualifications less than what the preceding generation would have obtained from them". I have previously argued this causes a kind of collective disillusionment [2, 3], which "results from the structural mismatch between aspirations and opportunities" ([4]: 137). That is to say, that there is a mismatch between the social identity that higher education seems to promise – the one it proposes on a provisional basis – and the social identity it actually offers as part of the labor market [4].

Thus the crossroads – as above, from the massification, fragmentation, and segmentation of higher education, the future of professional work, and the structural de-qualification of degrees – are further exacerbated by the presence of COVID-19 and the convulsions of our times. We discuss some of these in this text, and conclude with a proposal to face them and outline the future of higher education.
