UNESCO wants universities to change: here’s the best path

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), is a specialised UN agency that promotes peace and security through international cooperation in education, science and culture. UNESCO’s new global roadmap for higher education, released on 12 March, is blunt in its conclusion: “Business as usual”, it argues, is no longer viable. Universities must transform if they are to remain relevant in a world shaped by climate instability, technological disruption, and shifting patterns of work.

The report calls for a rethinking of higher education’s purpose, moving beyond narrow economic outcomes towards a broader social contract grounded in sustainability, inclusion, and shared prosperity. It advocates lifelong learning, interdisciplinary teaching, and deeper engagement with real-world challenges.

In many respects, this is a compelling diagnosis. The world universities must prepare students for is more complex, more interconnected and less predictable than in previous decades.

But the report leaves a critical question underdeveloped.

If higher education is to operate in this more uncertain and rapidly changing environment, what exactly are the capabilities students will need, and how are universities supposed to develop them in practice?

UNESCO emphasises critical thinking, creativity and collaboration. These are important. Yet they do not fully capture the kind of capability required in situations where problems are ill-defined, information is incomplete, and outcomes are uncertain.

The issue is not simply that the world is more complex. It is also less predictable.

In such conditions, the central capability is the ability to act in times of uncertainty. This involves forming judgements without complete information, testing possible courses of action, learning from feedback, and adapting as circumstances evolve. It is a capability that integrates thinking and doing, rather than treating them as separate stages.

Universities have long been effective at teaching students how to analyse. They are weaker at developing students who can act when analysis alone is insufficient.

This is where entrepreneurship becomes relevant.

The UNESCO report encourages universities to support “entrepreneurial opportunity” and to help students become “job creators” rather than simply job seekers. On the surface, this reads as a familiar call to expand start-up activity. But it also points to something more fundamental.

Entrepreneurship is not only, or even primarily, about starting businesses. It is a structured way of acting under uncertainty. It provides a set of practices for moving from ideas to action when neither the problem nor the solution is fully specified.

This is precisely what the report leaves implicit.

Entrepreneurial practice translates abstract capabilities into concrete learning processes. Identifying an opportunity requires students to interpret ambiguous situations and decide what matters. Mobilising resources requires working within constraints, persuading others, and operating without full control. Experimenting with solutions requires testing assumptions in real settings, where failure is possible and informative. Iterating based on feedback requires them to revise their thinking in light of new evidence.

Entrepreneurship education offers a path for all students to develop the capabilities UNESCO argues are now essential.

At many universities, however, entrepreneurship education is not well-positioned to play this role. Too often, it remains confined to business schools or is treated as a specialist pathway. Where it is more visible, it is often reduced to venture creation exercises, start-up competitions, or incubator programmes.

This model is increasingly misaligned with the challenges UNESCO identifies. It is too focused on firm creation, too detached from broader societal problems, and too isolated from other areas of the university.

If entrepreneurship is to help drive the transformation of higher education, it needs to be reconceptualised.

First, it must shift from venture creation to problem engagement. The goal is not simply to launch businesses, but to develop the capacity to intervene in complex systems, whether economic, social or environmental.

Second, it must be embedded across disciplines. The problems students will face do not respect academic boundaries. Entrepreneurship, in this sense, should operate as a connective layer, linking diverse forms of expertise to address real-world challenges.

Third, it must be grounded in experiential learning. Developing the ability to act under uncertainty requires exposure to situations where outcomes are not predetermined, where students must make decisions, take responsibility, and learn from consequences.

These shifts could move entrepreneurship to the centre of UNESCO's educational model.

UNESCO is right to argue that higher education must evolve. Its roadmap provides a persuasive account of why change is necessary and what directions it should take. But transformation depends not only on vision, but on mechanism.

Entrepreneurship points to how that mechanism might work. Not as a specialised activity, but as a set of practices through which students learn to think and act in a world where uncertainty and unpredictability are the norm.