**4. Conclusions**

For Portuguese academia, creativity could be seen as the skill to create new things or new ideas. Creativity and originality are typically used as synonymous. But could also be noticed to solve new or renew problems. Creativity could be as well the way to go beyond, think out of the box, or to transform problems and to create new answers.

In fact, creativity is a learning outcome cited for only 46.5% of study programs proposed to quality accreditation by the national agency for quality assurance of higher education in Portugal. However, when the focus is put on the frequency of each category coded, creativity is the third learning outcome least cited in the Portuguese academy. If according to Jackson et al. [38], higher education institutions tend to give more importance to critical thinking, but our results give up the idea of the significance of creativity in teaching and learning processes have been widely undervalued in higher education.

Portuguese academia clearly underestimates the importance of fostering creative skills in its bachelor and master students, which clearly runs counter to trends in the world of work and policy guidelines.

Universities (compared to more polytechnic institutions) and the public sector of Portuguese higher education system tend to value more creativity as a desirable learning outcome.

Most of the degrees in Engineering, Information and Media, Humanities, Life Sciences, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, and Arts and Architecture mention expressly creativity as a learning outcome. Health Sciences is the scientific area that least values creativity, since less than 22% of its courses refer to creativity as one of its learning outcomes. But if these results can be, at least in part, justified by the fact that the health sciences teaching/learning process is very focused on clinical protocols, as law focused on regulations, the same cannot be justified in the case of other scientific areas. Education, Social Sciences, and Business Sciences are explicit examples of the undervaluation of competences related to creativity as part of the professional profile of their graduates.

Advocating Wisdom [50], Portuguese higher education system seems to need a cultural change, "to help teachers understand and enhance their own creativity and to recognize this as an integral part of their professionalism" (p. 183), as well as warranting an institutional climate that boosts personal development not only of the students but also of the faculty staff.

To fostering creativity in higher education, it is critical the intentional development of an institutional culture that enhances creativity and its expression. Boosting active learning and inspiring students to be creative, originals and innovative is one of the ways of assuring that creativity was in fact a real learning outcome of higher education.
