“The [UK] creation of the Office for Students by the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act to ‘encourage competition between English higher education providers’ and to ‘promote value for money’ has been particularly instrumental in promoting a mercantile narrative that has forced universities to close departments and courses that have not been recruiting well.”
Zahid Naz, The employability agenda corrupts educational and personal values, The Times Higher Education Supplement (THE), April 6, 2024.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/employability-agenda-corrupts-educational-and-personal-values
“As a careers professional, I’ll admit I could feel my blood pressure rising when I saw an opinion piece on Times Higher Education’s website entitled ‘The employability agenda corrupts educational and personal values’.
Anyone working in careers and employability is likely to have come up against an argument along these lines before: that employability initiatives exist primarily to serve the needs of graduate employers and we want all students to become accountants, management consultants or investment bankers. An academic colleague once articulated their concern to me that incorporating more employability elements in a module would simply encourage students to be ‘good little neoliberal citizens’.
I do understand the strength of feeling behind the argument. It goes to the heart of the debate about the purpose of universities and the degree to which they exist to serve the needs of society, the individual and the economy. However, regardless of where you sit on that debate, I believe it’s a mistake to conclude that ‘the employability agenda’ is somehow incompatible with academically rigorous education.
Employability comes in all shapes and sizes, and activities within the curriculum can be designed in a way that complements and enhances understanding of subject-specific knowledge. Examples include presenting alumni case studies, designing authentic assessments that resemble workplace tasks, or creating ‘live projects’ in which students are given briefs by external organisations.”
Tom Coward, The employability agenda does not need to be controversial, The Times Higher Education Supplement (THE), May 23, 2024
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/employability-agenda-does-not-need-be-controversial
“Other contributors to this article will cover the financial challenges facing our great British universities, which do need to be addressed; I want to highlight three other areas for our next government to focus on….
-
Full funding for research and high-cost subjects.
-
More direct public investment in teaching
-
Reunite ministerial portfolios…”
Irene Tracey, Alison Wolf, Vivienne Stern Hetan Shah, How can we fix UK higher education? – part one, The Times Higher Education Supplement (THE), May 22, 2024
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/how-can-we-fix-uk-higher-education-part-one
“Universities are critical for the UK’s future. They are the major source of new ideas-led businesses, they educate the skilled workforce of tomorrow and they enable the UK to compete internationally as a science superpower and to exert long-term global influence.
Yet their business model is at risk of failing. The costs of both educating UK students and undertaking research are not covered by the public money awarded for either; in Russell Group universities, for instance, the fee paid by UK STEM students covers just over 65 per cent of the cost of course provision.”…
- Separate tuition fees from loan caps
- Guns away. Let’s have a UK Universities Accord…
[In the critic’s note for Part One and Two the two confused ideas of the series are
- More support for commercialisation
- Don’t give up on the current system…
These two narratives contradict everything else, the brilliant insights, and the hypo-commericalising and hypo-conservative narratives are plainly wrong and stupid, and merely the propaganda of the business world]
Irene Tracey, Alison Wolf, Vivienne Stern Hetan Shah, How can we fix UK higher education? – part one, The Times Higher Education Supplement (THE), May 22, 2024
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/how-can-we-fix-uk-higher-education-part-two
It all goes to why Vice-Chancellors do not employ me, today. I am a compatibilist philosopher who understands how the higher education debates are both insightful and stupid. The fundamental truth is that Australian Vice-Chancellors are generally captive to Councils-Senates which are dominated by the “dumbing-down” agenda, that is, the instrumentalism of the “Big Business World.”
The exceptions among the Vice-Chancellors are the ones who did employ me, and, now, the ones who will employ-contract me.
You are welcome and I am grateful.
Featured Image: Advert. It should be noted that I will be chairing the session, “050 Teaching and Doing History in a Digital Age,” at the 2024 Australian Historical Association conference at Flinders University. https://theaha.org.au/aha-conference-2024/
Neville Buch
Latest posts by Neville Buch (see all)
- J. D. Vance’s Insult to America is to Propagandize American Modernism - July 26, 2024
- Why both the two majority Australian political parties get it wrong, and why Australia is following the United States into ‘Higher Education’ idiocy - July 23, 2024
- Populist Nationalism Will Not Deliver; We have been Here Before, many times… - July 20, 2024