Learning, Curriculum and Employability in Higher Education

Peter Knight, Mantz Yorke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415303439
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134412129
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How can universities ensure that they are preparing their students for today's competitive job market?
This book tackles the highly topical subject of graduate underemployment with insight and clarity. The authors argue the case for more sophisticated research into employability with passion and vision, discussing how employability-friendly curricula can be developed, even in subjects which have less obvious vocational relevance.
The rapid growth of higher education over the past fifty years has seen expectations increase, and governments seeking to widen participation. There is now an urgent need for the Government and higher education institutions to address the issue of graduate employability. The authors of this timely book encourage a pro-active stance, offering a ground-breaking model that can be easily implemented in institutions to make low-cost, high-gain improvements to students' employability. Topics covered include:
* The challenge of employability
* The study and careers of English graduates
* The enhancement of practice
* Assessing employability
* The Skills Plus project.
Based on a set of over 200 in-depth interviews with recent graduates, this book forms a unique account of the meanings of employability in the workplace.

Part I

Employability

The first five chapters share a common concern to describe what is commonly being done to enhance employability while also developing an account of it that has some conceptual and empirical weight behind it.

There is nothing remarkable about the actions being taken in England to enhance employability – they are to be found in the curriculum and co-curriculum in many countries. Only in England, though, has a major government agency, in this case the Higher Education Funding Council for England, sponsored national work to raise awareness of what higher education institutions might do to enhance student employability, which means that English innovations are relatively well documented. Our choice of English examples to illustrate developments that can be identified around the world is one of convenience and not a claim that only in England is employability a concern.

Indeed, the account of employability that we develop, particularly in Chapters 2 and 3, emphasizes that this is an international concern. We argue that many of the outcomes and processes that are often reckoned to be characteristic of good higher education are highly conducive to strong claims to employability. So far from a care for employability being toxic to academic values, as is vulgarly often supposed, we see considerable overlap between what employers say they value in new graduate hires and what are regarded as hallmarks of good higher education. We say that insofar as there is some international agreement about the outcomes and processes associated with good higher education, then there is also, in practice, a concern for those things widely valued by employers. In short, higher education, at its best, contributes powerfully to well-based claims to employability because it proceeds by those processes and promotes those outcomes that researchers across the world have found to be valued in the graduate labour markets.

In Part I we describe practices that enrich these contributions, paying particular attention to the role played by the co-curriculum – by voluntary, elective and extra-curricular activities. However, we argue that valuable though good co-curricular arrangements are, good mainstream curricula have the greater potential. We rest our view of ‘good higher education’ and ‘good mainstream curricula’ on educational and psychological research sources that are seldom used in discussions of employability, which are often so under-theorized as to be quite vulnerable to challenge.

Chapter 1

The challenge of employability

Where’s the problem?

In England, where government figures show that almost all higher education institutions see over 90 per cent of new graduates in employment or taking further courses six months after graduation, academic staff are likely to wonder why anything needs to be done about employability. The 2003 White Paper (DfES, 2003) also notes that graduates in England have enjoyed a substantial lifetime wage premium. Elsewhere in the world premiums may be smaller and there may be greater concern about graduate employment rates, but it still seems necessary to explain what the problem is.

Three responses are as follows:

1 Many policy-makers believe that post-industrial countries will flourish according to their success in competing with other ‘knowledge economies’: the EC envisages Europe becoming the world’s leading knowledge economy by 2010 (Bourgeois, 2002), which depends upon new graduates being highly employable. It is not enough that they can find some work – it needs to be work that adds to the knowledge economy (Leadbeater, 2000; Reich, 2002). Governments, employers and other stakeholders have come to expect higher education to contribute to the development of a variety of complex ‘skills’¹ as well as ensuring an advanced command of worthwhile subjects. They tend to say that this enhances the stock of human capital and makes for national economic well-being; the idea is that educational success is an engine of wealth creation, especially in the knowledge economies of successful capitalism. In the words of a UK Government report:

Human capital directly increases productivity by raising the productive potential of employees. […] Improving skills and human capital is important in promoting growth, both as an input to production and by aiding technological progress. This has been recognized both in endogenous growth theory and also in empirical studies comparing growth in different countries.

(HM Treasury, 2000: 26, 32)

Higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK are now charged with promoting graduate employability – contributing directly to the stock of human capital – and their performances are monitored. Although no other country has acted as decisively as this, there is a concern in the states and provinces of the USA, Australia and Canada that higher education should give value for money by contributing highly-employable graduates to their economies.

2 Many governments are concerned to get high participation rates in higher education. However, strategies for widening participation need to be complemented by strategies for enhancing employability, not least because if new graduates fail to find jobs they consider worthy of their achievements, then there is a disincentive to others to participate. In England there are some signs that the lifetime earnings premium for a first degree is declining as the number of graduates entering the labour force increases.

3 What we commend as employability-enhancing practices are also practices that should be attractive to universities and colleges committed to enhancing the quality of learning, teaching and assessment: the principles of good learning and those for enhancing employability tend to be congruent.

The first two lines of argument are common, although vulnerable to claims that there is a demand-side problem with the notion of employability. Coleman and Keep (2001) argue that advanced Anglo-Saxon economies are too reliant on low-skill enterprises and that while employers may say they want graduates they often do not (Wolf, 2002) or cannot use them fully. The argument that there are skills gaps and shortages is often heard, as in this case:

According to the Conference Board of Canada …, 8 out of 10 organizations said that graduates should have better interpersonal skills, writing, presentation, listening and teamwork skills. A recent federal report card on the knowledge economy concluded, ‘Canadians have outstanding technical skills, but can’t work in teams, solve “real world” business problems and need to work on expressing themselves clearly’.

(Knowledge House, 2000: 3)

As an economic strategy, supply-side interventions to enhance graduate employability may promise more than can be delivered when the demand side is weak and when, whatever they say, enterprises do not capitalize upon the graduates they recruit. We do not need to take sides because we consider the third point persuasive by itself. Together the three points constitute a claim that the sorts of attainments valued by employers actually align quite well with educational values and admired practices. Despite the name, ‘employability’ can be understood as a concern with learning that has benefits for citizenship, continued learning and life in general. This position is endorsed by the Work Experience Group (2002: 9): ‘Many of the skills required for success in work are the same as those needed for success in life more generally’.

Consequently, we follow the description of employability used by the Generic Centre of the UK Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN)² and its associated Enhancing Student Employability Co-ordination Team (ESECT).³ They see employability as a set of achievements, understandings and personal attributes that make individuals more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations.

In later chapters we shall be developing the theme that good higher education practices make for strong claims to employability. First, we need to distinguish between employability and employment.

Employment and employability are different concepts

Employability, understood as suitability for graduate employment, is clearly not the same as graduate employment rates. In the UK, data are collected on whether graduates are employed six months after graduation (see HEFCE, 2002: 115ff). Although these data identify universities, colleges and subject areas associated with unusually low employment rates, and although there is a temptation to assume that low rates are evidence of poor institutional performance, we resist the inference that employment rates six months after graduation are valid indicators of employability. For example, researchers on the Access to What? project comment that:

In general, the findings support other studies which indicate that success in the labour market is to some extent associated with the background characteristics of the graduates. However, there are differences according to the various dimensions of employment success. There are also gender differences in the effects of background characteristics.

In the case of lower socio-economic background (as measured by parental occupation and parental education), both men and women graduates from lower socio-economic backgrounds received lower average salaries than graduates from more advantaged social backgrounds … In addition, male graduates from these backgrounds were more likely to have experienced a period of unemployment and were less likely to be in managerial and professional jobs than their middle-class counterparts …

… Asian men were less likely than other male graduates to characterise their jobs as ones which provided good opportunities to use their knowledge and skills. This was not the case, however, for Asian women who were also more likely to have a graduate job and to find their work challenging. Asian graduates of both genders were more likely than other graduates to be in managerial or professional jobs although these positive employment outcomes were not reflected in higher salaries or greater job satisfaction. In general, Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data indicated that graduates from ethnic minorities face greater difficulties in obtaining an initial job but are not less likely than other graduates to be in graduate level jobs. Substantially higher proportions of graduates among each black minority group and among both Indian and Pakistani groups were still seeking employment or training (without having any other main activity) six months after graduation. The same was true for Bangladeshi men. However, unemployment levels were only slightly above those of white graduates for Chinese and other Asian groups, and among Bangladeshi women.

(CHERI, 2002: 1, 2)

Harvey (2001: 103) develops these points, with Little (2001: 126) observing that ‘… the impact of social and cultural capital (independent of education) on the operation of the labour market varies by country’. Rhem (1998) says that working class students in the USA, rather like their English counterparts, are more likely to lack self-confidence as students, have fewer academic skills and not know how to ‘work the system’.

This is an important reason why we distinguish between ‘employability’, which refers to fitness, and employment rates, which reflect the operation of labour markets (Linke, 1991) that tend to compound the disadvantage experienced by certain groups of graduates. Nor do labour markets place all employable graduates in graduate jobs:⁴ ‘employability’ may improve graduates’ chances of getting graduate jobs but it does not assure them. There is the question of demand for graduate labour to consider as well. For example we will shortly address claims that Anglo-Saxon economies tend to rely on low skills, low profit enterprises and that there might be less of an employability problem than of an employment problem. Our reading of Maharasoa and Hay (2001) is that this is recognizable in South Africa, especially for Arts and Humanities graduates.

The question that dominates this book is how achievements appropriate to graduate jobs may be promoted. In the next section we offer an answer in terms of learning to make transitions, and translations, which implies some transformation of students during their undergraduate years. We will extend this rather high-level analysis with more concrete suggestions in later chapters.

Transitions, translations and transformations

Our analysis implies that many higher education institutions will need to change. We will not develop the organizational side here, concentrating instead on the implications for students. Nevertheless, we insist that many departments, universities and colleges will need to re-form themselves, in some cases to transform themselves, if they are to provide the programmes and undergraduate experiences that make for employability; t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Employability
• Part II Towards the enhancement of practice
• Envoi
• References
• Index