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Dirk van Dam, former director of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Center for Educational Research and Innovation, recently questioned expanding participation in higher education. international higher education.
“There are pressing signs that high levels of academic performance do not only have positive effects on society and the economy,” Professor Van Dam said, adding that “graduate students are underemployed, overqualified, mismatched and underemployed. “substitution effect.” Even more promising, he said, is the “rapidly growing interest in non-traditional certifications such as short programs and microcredentials.”
Van Dam’s colleague Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD’s education and skills department, agrees. He argued in London in March 2023 that microcredentials “can better tell employers what people know and can do,” again comparing them favorably to universities. . Life is “actually very comfortable” for the university, he says. He says, “When you bundle content, distribution, and certification, you can get some pretty good exclusive rental rates.”
The move to microcredentials means provider status no longer matters. Microcredentials appear to be the new path to equity. It’s hard to believe that combining middle-class degrees with micro-credentials for the masses will create social equity, but economic-minded policymakers are losing patience with higher education as we know it. There is growing evidence that this is happening.
The UK’s Teaching Excellence Framework compares the quality of student learning at different institutions and disciplines based on postgraduate salaries. Below-average salaries for graduate students have given some programs a stigma as “low-value courses.”
In Australia, the central government wants ājob-ready graduatesā and is funding the development of programs that lead to micro-credentials. In either case, the problem diagnosis and solution are the same. Higher education must be primarily (or solely) directly vocational. The concept of ‘job-ready graduates’ sums this up.
However, higher education is not suitable for this specific purpose. Preparing for work was one of its missions, but it was not its central mission. Moreover, that is not the only mission.
Higher education is not primarily about producing āemployableā graduates. It is the formation of human culture through immersion in academically based knowledge. Students are formed through deep learning in a variety of academic and professional fields ā or rather, they themselves are formed. What unites higher education is knowledge, not employability.
Intrinsic mission and extrinsic mission
Higher education has multiple missions, as Clark Carr famously advocated by calling universities “multiversity.” There are two types of missions for him: internal missions and external missions.
The classical core and essential mission of higher education is the education of students and the transmission, creation, and dissemination of knowledge. These missions form the internal organization of the sector. Teaching and learning, and scholarship and research, are based on epistemological fields, programs of study, departments and schools. The two essential missions are intertwined.
Learning is knowledge-intensive. The link between teaching and research/scholarship is a norm of academic identity and work. The value of these essential activities is measured internally using educational tools such as testing, grading, peer review, and academic quality assurance, rather than through policy, market, or societal influence.
Throughout history, higher education has taken several forms. Although they differ in many ways, they all share the same essential core.
In China, the Western Zhou Dynasty (1047-771 BC) trained scholars and officials through deep study of important texts.
The Library and Museion of Alexandria, the Buddhist monasteries of northern India such as Vikramshila and Nalanda, the Islamic studies of the Mediterranean, the universities of medieval Europe beginning at Bologna in 1088 AD, and educational institutions from Kant, von Humboldt, and John Henry Newman. In every iteration of. Beginning with Johns Hopkins University in 1876, all American research universities have prepared students through cultural immersion in knowledge and scholarship.
As Professor Gerd Biesta stated in 2009, higher education functions at its essential core as ‘socialization’ and ‘subjectification’. Socialization means inculcating social and professional norms. Subjectification refers to the “individualization” effect of education in which students become the agents of self-actualization.
āEducation worthy of the name must always contribute to a process of subjectification that enables those being educated to become more autonomous and independent in their thinking and actions,ā Biesta said. I am. In this way, higher education prepares students for life as a whole, including work.
Higher education also has an external mission, carried out in collaboration with other sectors of society, such as governments, employers, the professions, and local communities. Biesta refers specifically to the educational function of “qualifications” to learn how to do things in the workplace. In the external domain, external agents help determine the value of an activity. Graduate student salaries and employment rates are relevant here.
However, economic policy often focuses only on incidental provision for work, as if no other mission existed. Microcredentials reduce higher education to a qualification, break it up into pieces, and distribute it piece by piece.
education and work
If economic policy sets out to design higher education from scratch, focusing only on employable graduates, it will not use cultural formation, academic knowledge, and linkages between education and research as building blocks. . But society demands more from higher education.
Research has repeatedly found that most students have multiple goals in higher education. They want self-development, professional immersion, and graduate school employment. It’s not an either/or.
During their years of study, many students engage in work as well as education. However, the distinction between education and employment must not be blurred. They are different worlds. Agents differ in their positioning, objectives, values, knowledge sets and skills, and required behaviors. Skills and employability training is more effective in the workplace itself.
Embracing the heterogeneity of education and work is the first step to improving the transitions and combinations between education and work. Even with many vocational courses, the transition to work is difficult and time-consuming.
Higher education and work are best understood as loosely coupled. The relationship between higher education and work is not a linear flow. Pushing education and work into a single process, either by treating them as essentially the same thing or by subordinating one to the other, would encroach on either work or higher education . There are no prizes for guessing which one is more vulnerable.
Higher education is located between schooling and work. It’s more like school than work. But economic policy wants to reproduce work and value it on the same terms as work.
A new existential crisis
A gap is emerging between the proper educational function and the professional expectations of policy and the media. There was no need to position endogenous education as opposed to extrinsic contributions, or to present vocational skills and academic knowledge as zero-sum.
However, rather than paralleling the essential educational mission, policy makers in Australia and the UK, and in some other countries, have focused instead on an imaginary human capital, an extrinsic job readiness mission. A determined attempt is being made to introduce
Employability is becoming embedded in popular higher education with considerable moral authority. Everyone wants a job, and work is considered a human right. However, higher education is less effective in directly preparing people for work and cannot create jobs. And the idea of āāemployability obstructs vision of the core educational mission of student self-formation through immersion in knowledge.
The idea of āāa āwork-ready graduateā also creates unattainable expectations. I think this is emerging as an existential crisis for this industry.
Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, Director of the ESRC/RE Global Higher Education Center and Co-Editor-in-Chief of this journal. higher education, England. Email: simon.marginson@education.ox.ac.uk. This article first appeared in the latest edition. International higher education.