The importance of education in huma development has been reconfirmed by adopting Agenda 2030, Sustainable Development Goal (EDC) 4 Quality education focusing on ensuring high quality, inclusive and equitable education for all and promoting lifelong learning opportunities. Sustainable Development Goals can be addressed as a paradigm for reviewing and reorienting current education. At the same time, despite achievements, higher education faces more challenges, both at the system level and outside the system. At system level, we mention transformations with reference to the context of education, learning format, learning organization, the relationship between school and university, the teaching process, the role of the teacher, the role and nature of the student. Challenges outside the system are: migration, poverty, demographic aging, climate change, ensuring equality and equity etc. Thus, this article addresses the trends and challenges for the higher education system at the current stage. In a sense, education must lead to empowerment: through education, people can acquire the ability to make decisions and act effectively in accordance with these decisions. Thus, education consists in the development not only of personal qualities, but also of social ones; the dialogue between staff and colleagues, between common and individual interests, between rights and obligations.