Employability and Quality

Graduates should leave higher education better, in some ways, than when they entered. Ideally, this should be substantially attributable to the undergraduate curriculum, generously understood, rather than to the three or four years of ageing. Some describe this development in terms of becoming committed to a subject or area of enquiry and understanding it better. Others reckon that the quintessence is the development of mind and getting the beginnings of wisdom, while there are those who believe the real learning is about being with others and understanding oneself as a being. And there are those who say that the undergraduate experience may underpin all of these positive changes but that the development that counts most is a maturing value in the labour market. On this view, good quality higher education leads to good jobs or, if the labour market is dif® cult, to employability. In her paper, Louise Morley explains that it is widely accepted that a highly quali® ed, ̄ exible, continuously updating labour force is closely correlated with a country’s economic performance. Things may not be that simple, as she points out, but human-capital theories have such an intuitive and powerful hold that a government that failed to press higher education to do its utmost to enhance graduate employability would be seen to be negligent of national well-being. Governments may think that good quality higher education contributes powerfully to graduate employability but others fear that an emphasis on employability threatens other developmental outcomes, in the process displacing from quality discourses terms such as well-being, passion, wisdom, enjoyment and self-actualisation. The papers by Lee Harvey, Len Holmes, Brenda Little and Louise Morley identify other dif® culties with the attractive idea that a concern for employability is a concern for quality. To begin with, èmployability’ is a word in need of a meaning. It is not the same as `employment’, so attempts to measure the contribution institutions make to student employability by measuring new graduate employment rates are wide of the mark, as all four writers show. Harvey de® nes it as the propensity of the individual student to get employment but this still leaves two major problems. What contributes to that propensity: what is it that employable graduates have that others do not? Skills, for sure, but there is little agreement about which skills. More seriously there are powerful objections to t̀he skills agenda’ that has so dominated thinking about employability. Holmes provides a good review of some of them. Attributes, qualities and dispositions are regularly identi® ed as components of employability but the objections to the skills agenda are, if anything, stronger when applied to this trio. Besides, as Holmes points out, these achievements, whatever they might be, take on meaning and have impact in context; what appears as employability in a ® nal year course might not translate into workplace effectiveness. This hints at a further dif® culty upon which all four writers remark, namely, that the relationship between employability and employment is heavily mediated by unequal