The Relevance of the University in the Process of Linking with Society

In the current environment, the university-society relationship is a main element linked to its relevance, understood as the impact it causes in the context where it develops, so also this link should cause synergies with the other two processes that integrate university management, the process of research and teaching. However, its effectiveness, as a dynamizer of local development and an input to provoke improvements in the process, especially resulting in incremental breaks for the benefit of the teachinglearning process, has not yet reached the desired levels. In this sense, the objective of the work was to diagnose the current situation with reference to the subject, taking as a case study the analysis of the process of linkage in the Cuenca branch of the Universidad Politécnica Salesiana, Ecuador (UPS), in order to contribute to decision-making for the improvement of the university's relevance indexes. For this purpose, a mixed type of research was applied, through the use of focus groups with those involved in the process and the review and analysis of the projects implemented during the period 2017-2021. The results showed that there is a dispersion of the objectives of the linkage projects, which jeopardizes the achievement of the desired impact; the response to the needs of the environment is weak, since these are not verified and systematized; the link with research processes is insufficient, so synergies are not created between these processes that contribute to proposals for improvements for the innovation of the students' training process.