Don’t forget that the ‘academic’ and the ‘vocational’ are deeply intertwined

Andreas Schleicher, the chief education analyst at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, put it bluntly. Addressing himself to governments, he said: “You have two choices. You can [join] the race to the bottom, lowering wages for low-skill jobs. Or you can try to win in innovation and competitiveness. In the long run, if you don’t have natural resources to sell, skills are the only way of competing.”

It’s a stark proposition. It’s wrong to suggest that going to university is only about securing access to more elite parts of the labour market, and completely wrong to argue that universities are simply skills and job factories. For many policymakers, however, the global expansion of higher education over the past 50 years is explained by the choices they are making in response to Andreas’ challenge: the massification of higher education around the world is driven by the desire for better skills, higher productivity and more impactful innovation.

University leaders in England are keenly aware of the pressures. These now come not just from students looking to make choices that strengthen their futures but from government and regulators setting floor expectations for progression to the sorts of jobs classified as “highly skilled employment”. To say again: this isn’t the only purpose that universities fulfil, and it’s not the only reason for students to attend university. There is very good evidence that there are enormous non-economic benefits to attending university: graduates live longer, have healthier lives, have stronger civic participation and so on. But if it’s wrong to argue that universities are defined by their economic purposes, it’s equally wrong to deny that there is a degree of economic self-interest in making higher education choices.

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The increasing focus on the economic and labour market outcomes of going to university coincides, of course, with rapid change in the labour market. The workplaces of 50 years ago – still dominated by heavy industry or offices characterised by large “typing pools” and filing clerks – are not the workplaces of today. Futurology, whether in labour markets or betting shops, is usually a mug’s game, but it’s still a pretty safe assumption that the workplaces of 25 years hence will be different again.

The Daily Telegraph – not normally the most radical of journals – produced a feature recently looking at likely high-earning jobs in 2040. The article argued that “machines are predicted to be better than us at translating languages by 2024; writing high-school essays by 2026; driving a truck by 2027; working in retail by 2031; writing a bestselling book by 2049; and performing surgery by 2053”.

None of this means that technology necessarily destroys jobs. Azeem Azar’s absorbing account of the 21st-century economy, Exponential, makes the point that employment has tended to grow fastest in companies making the biggest investments in technology. Old jobs disappear, but new ones develop. The Telegraph article argues that “creative problem solving, empathetic reasoning, philosophical debate and the human group dynamics of collaborating…empathy, curiosity – very human things – will be vital”.

My old, and much-missed, friend David Watson pointed out that in the early 21st century, just as universities were trying to make themselves look more like workplaces, workplaces were trying to look more like universities.

And all this, of course, points to the huge challenge for employability practices in higher education. There are tensions between educating for the labour market as it is and the labour market as it may be. It’s this gap that is the most difficult – and most interesting – challenge for thinking creatively about what should be done. Rapid change in the labour market makes it more difficult, and the labour market is changing much faster than the decennial reclassification of what counts as highly skilled work.

It can be made more difficult by some persistent features of higher education. In some parts of universities, there remains a lingering Newmanite view that knowledge should be pursued for its own sake only or that the university should be withdrawn from society and certainly from the economy. There’s a countervailing difficulty. In almost all universities, curricula are regulated by professional bodies or government. This is true from medical schools to schools of architecture to teacher education to management. By definition, the result is that the education of the professionals of tomorrow is controlled by the professionals of today, whose interest is frequently in securing the things that seem to be needed now, rather than what might be needed in an unknowable future.

Creatively occupying this gap between what is and what might be is tough. Universities must be places in which students are helped to grasp, in the sociologist Michael Young’s concept, “powerful knowledge” – the knowledge that derives from understanding the conceptual underpinnings, and limitations, of disciplines. Universities increasingly need to challenge students to think in inter- and cross-disciplinary terms.

But it’s not enough to stop there, to focus solely on academic mission. Our students certainly don’t expect us to. Neither is it enough to think of universities as 21st-century training schools, turning the wheel of labour market-ready learners. When governments or regulators do this, they just look clumsy. Values always matter. The “academic” and the “vocational” are deeply intertwined.

A better set of debates is about the range of tools and concepts universities have to prepare themselves and students for an unknown economic future. Some of these are curricular. At Sheffield Hallam University, we have found it productive to set out curriculum design principles – the Hallam Model – that do not prescribe pedagogy or delivery but bake in the core ideas about engaging with the world, intellectual challenge, collaborative working and thriving individuals. Other tools are co- and extra-curricular. Yet others arise from embedding and universalising engagement with employability so that it is part of the constant and structured dialogue between academics, student support teams and students. All are navigating their way in a rapidly changing world.

None of this is easy, and none of us will always get this “right”. Engagement with employability, with the economic future is not a simple “fix”, not least because there are at least three parties involved: universities, the labour market and students. Universities as institutions are in flux. The labour market is changing at a ferocious pace. And, perhaps most importantly, students are themselves active agents in this change.

Sir Chris Husbands is vice-chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University, UK.

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