Higher education occupies an ambiguous position in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by the UN in 2015. SDG target 4.3 called for countries across the world to “ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, including university”. The mostly ignored SDG target 4.b called for higher education scholarships. Of course, the very inclusion of higher education in the SDGs reflected a major change from previous UN development agendas (Allais et al., 2020). A full decade in, none of this appears to have been particularly successful or consequential. However – perhaps somewhat unexpectedly – the relationship between the SDGs and universities (and other higher education institutions) has actually ended up being much more robust than anticipated. Quite strategically, through leadership from organizations like the International Association of Universities (IAU), the sector has made strong “contribute-to-the-SDGs” claims, and positioned itself as a key enabler for the delivery of all 17 SDGs through higher education’s role as a locus of reflection, teaching and research. This paper first looks historically at how the value story of higher education has been told in global education policy debates over the past four decades. It looks specifically at UNESCO’s World Conferences on Higher Education, which began in 1998, in order to trace continuities and discontinuities in how the importance of higher education has been framed and debated. The perceived legitimacy of higher education global development goals is very much in play at present. And, accordingly, the paper concludes by examining the possible evolution of global and regional governance of higher education in an eventual post-2030 agenda world.

Allais, S., Unterhalter, E., Molebatsi, P., Posholi, L., & Howell, C. (2020). Chapter 6 Universities, the Public Good, and the SDG 4 Vision (pp. 135–155). Brill.