National Development Plans and University Social Responsibility strategies. A synergistic question?

Abstract

During the last decades, the Colombian development model has been primarily influenced by neoclassical economic theory. For its part, higher education policy has not been immune to this trend and in recent years actions have been implemented to increase coverage and quality, taking advantage of the strengths of private institutions and promoting the articulation of the academic offer with the requirements of the sector productive. These development plans seem not to achieve their objective of reducing inequality, since inequality continues to be worryingly high in the country. For its part, university social responsibility (USR) has been implemented in different universities nationwide with the main purpose of generating action scenarios that provide a response to the main problems existing in Latin American societies. What is the relationship between national development plans and the implementation of USR in Colombian universities?