**6. Conclusions and recommendations**

The crossroads discussed result from the massification, segmentation, and fragmentation of higher education, changes in education, and the future of professional work. Given exacerbation from social turbulence – and in Latin America1 , especially since 2019 – the need to develop visionary strategies to face such challenges has been made apparent. Indeed, these challenges have been met, in part, by online academic work as a way of expanding student cultural, social, and symbolic capitals; as well as access to different worlds, cultures, realities, and subjectivities.

Furthermore, trends in the future of professional work show students need to develop ubiquitous learning, i.e., the ability to learn by themselves, to make use of skills such as abstraction, reasoning, synthesis and critical thinking. In this regard, prognostic intelligence – which amalgamates cognitive, sensitive and experiential contents – offers a predictive rationalism about future events to enhance the development of these skills, at least, during professional training; and, ideally, throughout educational models before and within higher education. Implementation would expand upon these and other professional skills in the immediate future, open alternatives in the labor force, and promote advantageous (over apocalyptic) prognoses of future

<sup>1</sup> These reflections derive from the research "Rethinking undergraduate training in social sciences in Chile from the imaginary of the future of professional work", Cod.DI / 37.0 / 2021, funded by the Vice Chancellor for Research y and Advanced Studies of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile, to whom we thank the financial and academic support.

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

events. Similary, prognostic intelligence would facilitate teaching approaches in the face of inevitable transformations in both higher education and in professional work.

While self-learning – and the associated skills in abstraction, reasoning, synthesis and critical thinking – facilitates ubiquitous learning, increases the subjective well-being of professionals, and expands new worlds of opportunities, there remain emerging social problems that require investigation and inputs for policies to address them, worldwide and in Latin America particularly. Open questions include the structural de-qualification of qualifications, the imaginaries of future professional work, the effects of teaching and utilizing prognostic intelligence, and the impacts of artificial intelligence on the future of training and professional work. Research and policy approaches should consider the realities of different latitudes, the transformational contexts in higher education and labor, and the upcoming crossroads generated from such changes.
