Higher education in the world and in Türkiye is undergoing a transformation with all its stakeholders. As we enter 2024, we are in a process where we are trying to understand and make sense of this transformation as students, academics, administrative staff of universities and employers. The different experiences and expectations of the new generation of university students compared to previous generations, the online education process that we can no longer be with or without after the pandemic, the exciting and sometimes unsettling developments in the field of artificial intelligence, the needs we have realized with the internationalization of our campuses, and the feedback on the employment of graduates call us to think together.

Founded in 2017, İstanbul Bilgi University Center for Higher Education Studies organized a panel in 2019 where Prof. Aydın Uğur said the following:

The issue is not loyalty to a mold, but responding to a need. I think what the university needs is such a new understanding. I don't want to say, ‘The university is dead; let's leave it alone.’ I want to say, ‘At this rate it will destroy itself; it should be redesigned.’

In the footsteps of these words, we came together under the roof of this center in December 2023 as BİLGİ members from different disciplines in order to contribute to the construction of a new understanding, responding to the needs. We wish to meet at our center with all students, graduates, academics, university administrative units and employer candidates who want to think, research, produce new policies and practices together on the academic, economic, political, legal, and cultural dimensions of higher education in today's world.