Employable me: Australian higher education and the employability agenda
- Emma Anderson
ABSTRACT
Few issues have attracted as much policy interest in the tertiary sector as graduate employability. Graduate employability positions universities and their students as key players in the national economy. At the same time, the standard conception of graduate employability, as it has evolved from human capital theory and modified by neoliberal ideology, has met with significant criticism. This paper reports on our analysis of the strategic plans of Australia’s 42 operating universities current in 2018 to better understand (1) the extent to which employability was embedded in each university’s strategic priorities and (2) the ways in which employability was characterised in those plans. Our paper provides empirical evidence of the way in which Australian universities universally and uniformly adopted a particular model of employability, simultaneously claiming its distinctiveness. Our analysis suggests the need for Australian universities to take a more thoughtful and nuanced approach to graduate employability.
Introduction
Graduate employability (GE) has been, and continues to be, of significance to universities and other stakeholders in Australia. It posits universities and their students as key players in the economy and is a core performance metric for Australian universities. The concept of GE is, however, contested and lacks clarity (Bennett et al., Citation2017). The conventional view of employability as premised on ‘government-driven economic instrumentalism’ infers ‘an idealised type of worker’ (Stoten, Citation2018, p. 9). At the same time, critiques challenge this discourse and contest its underlying assumptions (Stoten, Citation2018). This has created a variety of ways in which GE may be characterised and understood.
We analysed the public-facing strategic plans of Australia’s 42 operating universities current in 2018 to better understand (1) the extent to which employability was embedded in each university’s strategic priorities and (2) the ways in which employability was characterised therein. In particular, we wanted to determine the extent to which the characterisation of employability could be said to be performative.
Concerns about the performative character of GE have been raised by P. Brown (Citation2013), W. Brown (Citation2016) and Frankham (Citation2017). In the neoliberal environment excellence and value must be visible and measurable, leading to the concept of performativity. This is a ‘powerful and insidious’ public technology that ‘links effort, values, purposes and self-understanding to measures and comparisons of output’. Reporting replaces doing, productivity replaces experience, and individuals must inflate and promote themselves (Ball, Citation2012). The performances of both individuals and organisations provide measures of productivity and displays of ‘quality’ that represent value within a field of judgement (Ball, Citation2000). Thus, student success and the value of higher education are measured in terms of ‘graduates’ returns in future jobs and earnings’ – that is, GE (Tomlinson, Citation2015).
We found the goal of increasing GE to be universal in the strategic plans of Australian universities; that the characterisation of GE was uniform; and highly performative for both students and universities in Australia. The strategic plans reproduce a particular set of discourses with similar themes: employability education as heavily skills-based, an emphasis on competition and gaining a ‘winning edge’ through education, and the responsibilisation of the individual student: that is, ‘responsibility for managing one’s life, and hence one’s learning trajectory, is increasingly placed on individuals (Krause-Jensen & Garsten, Citation2014, p. 3). In this article, we have termed this set of recognisable themes as the ‘standard concept’ of GE. This is a model that has met with considerable criticism in the literature (see, for example, Bennett, Citation2018; Hora et al., Citation2020; Moreau & Leathwood, Citation2006).
As Bennett et al. (Citation2017) assert, research into GE rarely examines the strategies adopted at an institution-wide level, instead, tending to focus on activities across a single or small group of institutions or departments. Our study thus contributes to existing knowledge by providing empirical evidence of the model of GE used strategically across public Australian universities at a point in time. We acknowledge that there may be nuances in the application of university policy that may be found in the practice within universities or in teaching and learning plans. However, our interest was in broad strategic intent and the ways in which universities present themselves to the outside world and to prospective students.
We also acknowledge that strategic plans introduced since 2018 May evidence a different understanding of employability. However, our study provides a snapshot of policy on employability across the university sector and, as will be discussed, the plans evidence a very particular model of employability, despite the fact that, by 2018, there was a substantial body of literature that was highly critical of that model.
We begin by providing some background to the rise of what we term the ‘standard concept’ of GE and its relationship to universities. We then provide an overview of the critiques of the standard concept of employability. From this point, we outline the method and findings of our study, before proceeding to discussion of the issues and implications.