Postgraduate studies for the social development of the country. What has happened in Cuba?

Postgraduate studies for the social development of the country. What has happened in Cuba?

Los estudios de posgrado para el desarrollo social del país. ¿Qué ha sucedido en Cuba?

Pós-graduação para o desenvolvimento social do país. O que aconteceu em Cuba?

¹ University of Pinar del Rio "Brothers Saiz Montes de Oca".

You should not be afraid of the changes that the
pedagogical process of professional improvement
can bring with it. We are resistant to these changes due to our
very human nature, but if you want
to continue contributing to improving
quality, you have to change.
Moving forward without setbacks, without fear of the new,
without unnecessary taboos...
Bernaza, Troitiño and López (2018)

The strategic role that knowledge fulfills with the new technological paradigm, which modern society presents today, explains the importance of education and professional training, as a source of modernization and personal development of citizens.

In order to guarantee sustainable development and face the challenges imposed by the 21st century, it is unavoidable to understand the need for quality postgraduate studies, as an effective way to guarantee social development, even from the workplace of professionals, through fundamentals that guarantee the continuous training of teaching staff, to expand inter-university cooperation in relation to the training of human resources and research and development (Bernaza, Troitiño and López, 2018).

An unquestionable and lucid statement in understanding the lack of economic development is that "poverty is overcome with education." There is also talk of "investing" in education. And in recent decades there has been talk specifically of investments in "human capital".

It is evident, on the one hand, that education is one of the aspects that humanizes man. It is an activity that leads him through its most essential dimensions to fully form him from his basic natural condition of affectivity, rationality, sociability and transcendence, allowing him to leave his center of strict biological dependence or mere survival, becoming an architect of culture and prosperity.

On the other hand, it is also necessary to continue admitting the affirmation that poverty is overcome with education. However, education that humanizes is not reduced to technical training and even less to productive instruction. And while it is true that even the cultural and moral aspects can be measured from an economic perspective, the search for these aspects cannot be calculated as subsumed in a partiality. But together with an anthropological reduction, the problem is to conceive the formative direction, in view of the consequence or usefulness of said training. In other words: not because education allows a better development of the country, education can be defined by the economic development that the country achieves.

In a global context, postgraduate studies are first-order determinants of scientific and technological production and consequently with the quality of life or wealth of countries (Aguirre, Castrillón and Arango-Alzate, 2019).

The demand of the globalized world in terms of knowledge is accentuated every day, one of the main requirements being the training of proactive people, with the capacity to impact development and innovation in society, through the areas of their discipline. The postgraduate course is strictly necessary to develop science and technology, to generate and disseminate knowledge, the cultivation of ethics and morality among the student body and the society to which they belong.

This imprint marks the imperative of training professionals with a high degree of participation in society's problems and a deep scientific level, for which reason the university convenes and directs the processes to investigate and deepen the training of professionals committed to scientific research. and the development that society needs.

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and their graduate students have an implicit responsibility in their research, for the contributions they make to the community and its development, and of course, to the country in which they live (Berzunza-Criollo, 2020).

Taking into account the above and being consistent with these arguments, I believe that the development of a country's potential is associated with a variety of factors, including human capital and scientific production, considered as components of social development and economic growth.

Human capital (Salas-Canales, 2021) is understood as the knowledge acquired by individuals during their lives and that they use it to produce good services or ideas in the market or outside it. That is why the formation of human capital directly contributes to increasing productivity at a much faster rate than conventional (non-human) capital and its growth is the most characteristic feature of the economic system.

From human capital management, people are a tangible resource in the organization and their value will depend on the knowledge and skills they possess. The dynamics of its acquisition includes a diversity of human attributes, not only of educational level (academic titles), but also of a wide range of capacities and abilities related to the development of higher mental processes (memory, thought and language), which they contribute to the development of activities that increase productivity, through the creation of sources of income and economic welfare states.

Research such as that of Barros-Bastidas and Turpo (2020) ensures that, in the formation of human capital for research, the inclusion of qualitative components associated with cultural increases affects individual capacities. Therefore, the training expenses are reflected in the improvement of their capacities: to the extent that their involvement in a variety of training activities (internships, mobility, exchanges, etc.) is encouraged, the quantitative and qualitative increase of the institutional productivity.

Greater education contributes to the return on investment, generating high skills that make them more productive. A high education allows to emit signals of their qualifications, innate or acquired, that yield in greater income and compensations.

According to the OECD 1998 (as cited in Barros-Bastidas and Turpo, 2020), knowledge together with professional skills constitute factors of progress and economic and social well-being, since they are nourished by the accumulation of human capital and its positive impact on per capita income.

Universities as components of socio-economic systems have significant relevance in the productivity and competitiveness of countries. At the level of scientific production, the contribution of university teaching staff as researchers and producers of knowledge constitutes a significant indicator of institutional development, framed in the university evaluation model. The expansion of research training is closely related to the optimal possibilities of social and economic development, through the generation of knowledge associated with its profitability.

From the foregoing it can be deduced: knowledge is gold, the postgraduate preparation that constitutes the path to achieve it, is also golden.

How does this process develop in Cuba and how does your organization influence the social and economic development of the country?

The importance of the postgraduate courses lies in the fact that the substantive functions of the HEIs are no longer only the training of professionals and scientific research, but rather, in the social demand that is made to the universities in the so-called "Third Mission", that they strive for transferring the results of their teaching and research processes in a relevant and contextualized way with their environment.

In addition, they constitute the interface between the productive environment with society and academia, which means that they have to be dynamic and flexible to give a timely response to the permanent changes in the demands for knowledge and specialization within the framework of what is has been called permanent education (Life - long learning ).

The technical scientific achievements of the universities must be the social benefits of society in general and of its immediate environment in particular.

Although there is a set of changes that Cuban higher education is undergoing in general, the most important transformations occur more intensely at the postgraduate level.

This educational level has rules of supply, demand, competencies, students, teachers, research differentiated from the degree. The postgraduate is an educational structure that involves other social actors who do not live in the academy, since a good part of its students (clients) come from areas outside the university walls.

It is important to recognize that, beyond the different disciplinary traditions that develop according to the influence of national policies and markets, some trends that can accelerate their influence on the social and economic development of the community must be clearly evidenced in the postgraduate course. society: emergence of new disciplines, interdisciplinarity, specialization, internationalization.

The Association of American Universities (as cited in Aguirre, Castrillón and Arango- Alzate, 2019) states that global postgraduate courses present their main challenges associated with:

2. Increased skills of graduates to achieve high performance in diverse environments.

Cuba is not exempt from these challenges and the history of its postgraduate studies proves it.

1. Serious changes in higher education are taking place in Cuba. Many five-year programs are reduced to four with the aim of accelerating professional training time and optimizing the training curriculum, sometimes with content saturated with information that the graduate did not get to use in his professional life. The reduction of curricular training time justifies the necessary preparation for employment and postgraduate studies with the aim of giving continuity to professional training, specifically, the development of professional skills for the performance of the specific work activity.

As for the postgraduate course from RESOLUTION No. 140 /19 of the Ministry of Higher Education of the Republic of Cuba, in CHAPTER III ON THE CREDIT SYSTEM, Article 14.1, the value of academic credits was transformed: One academic credit is equivalent thirty (30) total hours of student work; until now it was 48 hours.

These transformations in terms of study time have been received very correctly, but the previous structure has left traces in the training of students and in the adequate and timely incidence in the social development of the country.

Regarding the variety in its specialization, the postgraduate course has not been adequately developed with respect to the truthful diagnosis of its needs for professional improvement, taking into account the efforts and evaluations of local development that promote a consistent and necessary scientific proposal that contributes to solving the problems that determine the quality of life of the local society.

2. As a trend, the participation of professionals in the courses is higher than the participation in training and diploma courses. For a professional who accesses training, around 12 access courses and 7 a diploma. This is due to the fact that the course is traditionally used in our country and the formative potential of the training is unknown.

Training is the overcoming that seeks to prepare the professional for a certain position. Its objectives are short-term, limited and immediate, seeking to provide the essential elements for the exercise of a position and preparing it adequately.

Training involves the transition of specific knowledge related to work, attitudes towards aspects of the organization, the task and the environment, development of skills and values for performance. Any task, whether complex or simple, necessarily involves these three aspects.

Training fills the gap between what someone is capable of doing and what they may become capable of doing. Its first purpose is to ensure, as soon as possible, that professionals can reach an acceptable level in their work. Based on this, training acts to improve capabilities, which means that it is capable of performing or has developed potential for the future (Bernaza, Troitiño, & López, 2018).

Not all managers recognize that professional improvement is a necessary investment to raise the preparation of their human resources, which is reinvested in greater production and high service. Remember that the performance of the worker can be measured through the results of a company. The idea that agencies have the greatest responsibility for the training of their workforce does not seem sufficiently emphasized. If you do not claim the participation of the universities, nothing can be done. They have to have worker training incorporated into their strategic projections. Experience says that they are very far from this. Only then can universities play the role that politics assigns them.

The preparation for employment is conceived and executed in the companies with the purpose of developing in the professional the specific modes of action related to their job position. At this stage, the greatest responsibility falls on the employer organizations and for years there has been a disagreement between them and the university as a space for training and training.

The increase in the skills of graduates to achieve high performance in diverse environments has been affected by this situation and as a consequence worker in numerous areas of certain work exercises have been left without the specialized training they require.

3. Studying and working interdisciplinary is an act of complex educational agreements. Interdisciplinary research can be understood as a research question that crosses disciplinary boundaries. This often involves engaging with phenomena that are studied by different disciplines. In the same way it will be necessary to use theories or methods of various disciplines.

Postgraduate studies, and as a scientific consequence, the social and economic development of a country, benefit greatly from the interdisciplinary methodology. It will certainly resort to the integration of ideas from

different disciplines. This in turn requires the evaluation of ideas in the context of the disciplinary perspective. Likewise, it will be essential to reflect on epistemology and develop an interdisciplinary epistemological perspective.

In the field of knowledge, interdisciplinarity offers a way to overcome the fragmentation of knowledge that specialization exhibits as inevitable, allowing a certain unity of knowledge to be achieved, not as a "reduction to identity" but as an awareness of the complexity of the realities the possibility of improving the understanding of a situation or problem from the perspective of different disciplines and, consequently, the presentation of various solutions.

Postgraduate studies have suffered from these interdisciplinary approaches, it has not been taken into account that postgraduate learning is a didactic challenge of university specialization that must be addressed; since in the same master's degree we can find profiles of students from different backgrounds of studies and with also varied work experiences. At the same time, we must bear in mind that said learning is difficult to fragment into subjects, since an entire postgraduate course must provide the competencies, skills, and knowledge proposed in its study plan; Clearly, the challenge lies in the balance between the transversality of the field of study and the specialization from each subject and that this is correctly perceived by all postgraduate students.

Interdisciplinarity offers the possibility of responding to social problems that are difficult to solve from multiple scientific perspectives and not clinging to a single way of understanding and solving reality, interdisciplinarity can and should provide information on the urgent challenges of public policies.

In particular, interdisciplinary research can transcend the biases and disagreements that characterize single theoretical and practical approaches. Our postgraduate has historically been disciplinary; disciplinary graduate programs have exposed students to the nature of a particular field and the kinds of questions, theories, methods, and terminology that it accepts, as a consequence the solution to society's problems has been characterized by a kind of scientific conformity that, far from favoring, hinders social development.

Although it is true that these scientific investigative circumstances are in the process of being transformed; They have determined for years the characteristics of the postgraduate studies that have been taught in universities and hence their social footprint.

I do not consider that the process of professional improvement through postgraduate studies is going down the wrong path, there are innumerable samples of scientific, technical and technological progress that this substantive process of higher education has shown, but pedagogical, investigative practices must definitely be changed, organizational and temporalize them to the current Cuban society.

Bernaza, G. J., Troitiño, D. M. y López, Z. S. (2018). La superación del profesional: mover ideas y avanzar más. La Habana: Editorial Universitaria https://www.researchgate.net/