Young people have ever been confronted with difficulties. But today’s challenges are of a particular magnitude: growing inequalities, climate change, loss of biodiversity, the health crisis, energy crisis, and issues related to the use of new technologies such as AI, to name but a few.

The complexity of these environmental, economic and societal challenges is testing the limits of our current higher education models. They appear obsolete because they are no longer adapted to the problems faced by young people, but also because they are based on and convey values which no longer seem to make sense to this new generation.

The Higher Education for Good Foundation (HE4G) created Youth Talks to help support educational institutions transform their curricula to meet the needs of the mid-21st century, not least by equipping young people to lead and participate in solving the pressing global challenges of this age.

HE4G’s role will be to help its partners better understand what young people want, thanks to the results of Youth Talks and to think through how to integrate this demand with their in-house expertise in education to design curriculums that bring the best of established and innovative knowledge and approaches to education.

The foundation draws its inspiration from thinking on capabilities, i.e. the freedom of an individual to make the choices they deem worthwhile at a given time, in a given territory, and to put into practice the actions linked to these choices. This is derived from work by by Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize winner in economics, and by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. What the Foundation proposes is therefore in line with the objectives of sustainable development. Higher education must play a major role in cultivating the capacity of each individual, at the key moment of passage to “adulthood,” to transform the society in which they are growing up, at their own level and in their own manner.