Employability: a core role of higher education?

ABSTRACT

The topic of employability has been much discussed in higher education policy and research contexts in recent years, as higher education has been re-positioned as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. This article aims to review and synthesise the various arguments that have been made in favour of, or against, the adoption of employability as a core purpose or value of higher education. The article makes use of the techniques of systematic review. It discusses the origins and meaning of the term employability, its application and practice, and the issues and critiques that it has raised.

KEYWORDS:

• Employability
• higher education
• higher education research
• systematic review

Introduction

The topic of employability has been much discussed in higher education policy and research contexts in recent years. Building on a centuries long debate about the developmental and vocational purposes of higher education, and in the contemporary context of the massification of many higher education systems across the world, employability stresses the idea that higher education graduates should be able to make immediate and productive inputs to the economy. Higher education is thus effectively re-positioned as a means to an end (worthwhile employment) rather than an end in itself (the development of intellectually well-rounded individuals).

Employability as a core, or perhaps the core, purpose of higher education has been adopted by national governments (e.g. in the UK, the Office for Students has produced a Graduate Employability and Skills Guide for students) and international bodies, and implemented by many higher education institutions. However, and partly because of its enthusiastic adoption by many governments and institutions, it has also been the subject of considerable criticism by those who work in and/or research higher education.

This article aims to review and synthesise the various arguments that have been made in favour of, or against, the adoption of employability as a core purpose or value of higher education. In doing so it seeks to address the underlying, fundamental question of what higher education is really for.

Methodologically, the article makes use of the techniques of systematic review (Jesson, Matheson, and Lacey 2011; Tight 2020; Torgerson 2003). Databases (Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science) were searched using keywords to identify potentially relevant articles and reports that had been published on the topic. Those identified were then downloaded and examined, and retained for further analysis if they proved to be relevant. The reference lists in these articles and reports were checked for other potentially relevant sources to follow up.

The article proceeds by discussing the origins and meaning of the term employability. Its application and practice are then reviewed, and the issues and critiques that it has raised are identified. This then leads on to some conclusions.

Origins and meaning

Context and competing concepts

Two initial and key points to be made about the adoption of employability in higher education are that: (i) its usage has to be seen in its historical context, and (ii) there are other competing concepts that seek, or have sought, to address much the same issues.

First, historically, there has always been debate about the purposes of higher education. For example, in the English context, Newman (1976/1852) and his ideas about the university as a communal, residential space, a kind of finishing school for young gentlemen, are still widely referred to. In Germany, Humboldt is the key reference point, with his stress on teaching through research and Bildung or all-round education (Hofstetter 2001; Pritchard 1990). And, in the United States, Kerr (2001/1963), and his idea of the multiversity serving a whole range of demands and communities, cannot be ignored.

With the massification of higher education, initially in the USA and Canada in the post-war period, and then in the last few decades in many countries in Europe and the Asia/Pacific region, the debate has continued and become more complex (Teichler 2015; Tight 2019). Those served by higher education are now a much more heterogeneous group, with varied demands and expectations.

Second, employability is far from being the only concept in town. There are many, more or less synonymous, ideas around (e.g. enterprise, entrepreneurialism, graduate attributes, key skills, transferable skills, 21^st century skills (Tight 2021)), and these seem to come, spread and disappear like fashions. Indeed, the regular appearance, and reappearance, of such ideas may be seen as a continuing assault on higher education, its institutions and employees. Seen in this context, employability is either one of the more recent and appealing constructs, or the latest and most pervasive assault.

Defining employability

What, then, does employability mean? Unsurprisingly, as with many ideas that have been taken up and widely applied, there are a range of different views, and these have changed and developed over time. Glover, Law and Youngman (2002) distinguish between employability and the older, and now largely superseded, notion of graduateness, identifying: ‘graduateness as a state after the completion of a course, and employability as an assessment of the economic worth of a student at that time’ (p. 293).

Small, Shacklock and Marchant (2018) argue that the changes that have taken place in higher education and society have placed more responsibility on graduates to define themselves as employable:

the nature of employability has changed over the past century. Today, graduates are more likely to be required to rely on their own initiative and abilities to manage themselves into employment in what is now a highly competitive workforce, rather than gain employment because they can and want to work, as appears to have been the case in the early 1900s. (p. 162)

Kruss (2004) refers to the contemporary understanding of employability as a ‘common new model’:

that assumes a direct link between higher education and the labour market [that] increasingly underpins these expectations. The tacit skills, knowledge, and attitudes formerly developed through work experience are now expected to be an integral part of higher education programmes and curricula, to provide the ‘soft’, ‘transverse’, ‘life’, or ‘high’ skills—as they are variously termed by different sectors. (p. 673)

Kruss makes it clear that the shift in responsibility for developing employability has not only been away from the employer and towards the individual graduate, but also away from the employer and towards the university or college. It is no longer seen to be the case that having the requisite academic qualifications is enough to get a graduate a graduate-level job, within which their skills will then be developed further by their employer; other qualities are required as well:

The increasing competitiveness, globalization and internationalization of job markets have resulted in unique demands from employers in terms of skills and competencies expected from graduates. The focus has now shifted from degrees and certificates serving as a valid measurement of graduate employability to specific combinations of discipline-specific as well as extra-curricular activities, attributes and competencies. (Mishra and Braun 2021, 91)

The terms skills and competencies are widely used in tandem in discussions of employability, with skills, the older of the two terms, seen as the additional qualities that a graduate needs to have in order to gain employment, and competencies conveying the idea that these skills have to be demonstrable. Part of the graduate’s task in convincing a potential employer of their employability, therefore, is being able to articulate and exemplify the competencies they have developed:

Employability is a complex, contested concept which has tended to be considered in terms of a dominant discourse of skills … employability needs to be thought of more holistically, as ongoing, life-long, situated learning, whilst acknowledging that the contested language of skills and the need to demonstrate competency through examples is embedded in employers’ recruitment processes. Therefore the ability to articulate what a graduate can offer to employers, framed in terms of skills and expressed in narratives which provide convincing examples, is important in establishing potential employability. (Blaquière, Nolan, and Wray 2019, 15)

Qualities and kinds of employability

Others have qualified the idea of employability. Thus, Suleman (2021) talks of ‘contingent’ employability, recognising that whether a graduate is employed depends on many factors, some more or less within the control of the graduate and their higher education institution, and others which are completely outside of their control, such as the graduate’s social background and labour market conditions:

The notion of contingent employability has been proposed to indicate that economic, social and personal factors have a decisive effect on employability. Graduates’ employability depends on human capital, skills, skill and cultural matching, social background and stereotypes, personal images, and labour market conditions. Some of these factors are common to entrepreneurship, but the personal traits, especially the ability to take risk, are viewed herein as being more influential. All these factors reduce HE’s [higher education’s] role in developing employability, limiting it almost to the provision of educational opportunities and skill acquisition. Policymakers should acknowledge that the provision of skills is just one of many solutions and HE cannot be blamed for the variation in the employability of graduates. (p. 558)

In this view, the higher education institution, and the graduate, can only do so much, and much else still rests on the employer.

Kahn and Lundgren-Resenterra (2021) take a different perspective, rejecting the emphasis of employability on the individual graduate, and arguing that a more collective approach is both possible and desirable:

graduate employability is understood as the capacity of a graduate to act as an agent within the workplace in ways that contribute to the maintenance and elaboration of collectives. It is argued that were higher education to treat collectives as an integral aspect of learning, then workplaces could be aligned more directly towards values that matter to society. (p. 535)

Bridgstock and Tippett (2019) similarly explore what they term a ‘connectedness learning’ approach. After all, working in groups or teams is increasingly emphasised in both higher education and the workplace.

Other researchers have identified different kinds of employability. Fakunle and Higson (2021), for example, distinguish between outcomes, process and conceptual approaches to employability. The outcomes approach is the dominant conceptualisation, which ‘focuses on the development of individual characteristics, work-related factors, and quantitative measurement of employability using data on employment’ (p. 527). The process approach focuses on the employability initiatives adopted within the higher education institution, while the conceptual approach relates to the underlying theories applied, such as human capital, positional conflict and critical realism.

Holmes (2013) identifies three elements of employability: possession, position and process. The first of these, possession, is again the dominant conceptualisation, encompassing the skills, competencies, attitudes, etc. that the graduate possesses. The second element relates to social positioning, suggesting that graduates may only be able to do so much to move beyond their background. Holmes prefers the processual approach, which sees the graduate as engaged in an identity project as they move from higher education into work, something which higher educational institutions can help with.

Okay-Somerville and Scholarios (2017) add support to this interpretation through their analysis of surveys of two graduate cohorts (n = 293) across the UK:

Findings support the process view of graduate employability, developed through engaging in CSM [career self-management], in particular environment exploration, networking and guidance seeking. There is also some support for a possession view where educational credentials predict employment quality and perceived employability. Theoretically, the study highlights the importance of proactive career behaviours as well as the constraining role of educational credentials for some during university-to-work transitions. (p. 1275)

Rather than seeing educational credentials as a qualification for employment, to which more generic skills and competencies may be added to signal employability, this argument presents them as a possible constraint. If so, then the traditional reasons for attending and graduating from university or college are cast into doubt.

Somewhat in support of this, Quinlan and Renninger (2022) take a more conventional view, arguing that students who have and/or develop a strong interest in the subject they are studying, and who have a clear, ‘decided’, view on what they want to do after they graduate, are much better placed in employability terms:

universities striving to enhance graduates’ employability need to focus not just on employability skills, but on supporting the development of students’ interests. Conceptualising interest as a variable that develops, we found that students who were more interested in their subject also tended to want to pursue that disciplinary interest in their careers and tended to be more decided in their career plans. Decidedness is a key factor identified in successful employment outcomes. (p. 880)

While the great majority of undergraduates nowadays are following courses that are designed to lead them into specific vocations or professions (e.g. in business, engineering, medicine, nursing, social work or teaching), a substantial minority are enrolled in discipline-based programmes that are not so closely linked. Decidedness may not be so easily attained or delivered for students in the latter group.

Stakeholders

Other researchers have focused on particular groups or stakeholders (Caballero, Vázquez, and Quintás 2015) involved in the employability debate, and their perspectives on it. Most obviously, these groups include students (Bonnard 2020). (Tomlinson 2008), for example, based on interviews with 53 final year undergraduates at a UK university, concludes that students have largely adopted the dominant employability perspective:

students perceive their academic qualifications as having a declining role in shaping their employment outcomes in what is perceived to be a congested and competitive graduate labour market. While academic credentials are still seen as a significant dimension of their employability, students increasingly see the need to add value to them in order to gain an advantage in the labour market. (2008, p. 49)

Particular groups of students have also garnered attention in this context, including international (Fakunle 2021; Huang and Turner 2018) and mature students (Lavender 2020).

Others have noted how views on employability vary between disciplines and nations. Thus, Chadha and Toner (2017) note that ‘in the UK, the broad discourse is centred upon government policies and targeted preparation for employment while in the USA it is centred upon the institutional vision and social inclusion agenda’ (p. 1). This reflects, in part, the different structures of these two higher education systems, with government more directly involved in the UK and a much larger private sector in the USA.

Application and practice

Overall findings

Research and writing on employability in higher education is a significant and fast-growing activity. For example, a search carried out using Scopus on 14/3/23 identified 2731 articles with the words ‘employability’, ‘higher’ and ‘education’ in their titles, abstracts or keywords, which may be taken as suggesting some interest in the topic; and 193 articles with these three words in their titles, which may be taken as indicating a particular interest in the topic. A search on the same day using the words ‘employability’ and ‘university’ identified 3115 and 230 articles respectively.

Most of the articles identified are relatively recent in date. Thus, for the first of the searches, 2482 (91%) of the 2731 articles had been published since 2010, with 1000 (37%) since 2020. There are, though, some earlier studies (e.g. Johnes, Taylor, and Ferguson 1987; Taylor 1986), but nothing much more than 40 years old.

Unsurprisingly, the main English-speaking nations account for the majority of the (English language) articles identified. Thus, for the first of the searches mentioned, the United Kingdom alone accounted for 780 (29%) of all the articles identified, while the four English-speaking nations of the UK, Australia, the USA and Canada together accounted for nearly half, 1336 (49%) of the articles. However, first authorship was dispersed over 110 different countries, with authors based in Spain (e.g. Santos-Jaen, Iglesias-Sanchez, and Jambrino-Maldonado 2022), Malaysia (e.g. Ma’dan, Ismail, and Daud 2020; Turner, Amirnuddin, and Singh 2019), India (e.g. Borah, Malik, and Massini 2021) and Portugal (e.g. Eurico, da Silva, and Do Valle 2015; Monteiro et al. 2022) each contributing over 100 articles.

The interest in employability in higher education was, though, truly global. Examples of articles produced by authors based in Cambodia (Chea and Lo 2022), Chile (Espinoza et al. 2020), Czechia (Krajnakova, Pilinkiene, and Bulko 2020), Ethiopia (Fenta et al. 2019), Finland (Räty et al. 2020), Ghana (Aboagye and Puoza 2021; Damoah, Peprah, and Brefo 2021; Ofosuhene 2022), Greece (Panagiotakopoulos 2012), Hong Kong (Lam and Tang 2021), Indonesia (Noperman et al. 2020), Iran (Pouratashi 2019), Italy (Petruzziello et al. 2022; Schettino, Marino, and Capone 2022), Japan (Sato et al. 2021), Korea (Kim, Kim, and Tzokas 2022), Lebanon (Nauffal and Skulte-Ouaiss 2018), Nigeria (Igwe, Lock, and Rugara 2022; Nwajiuba et al. 2020; Okolie et al. 2020), The Philippines (Pamittan et al. 2022), Poland (Grotkowska, Wincenciak, and Gajderowicz 2015), Romania (Frunzaru et al. 2018), Slovakia (Krajnakova, Pilinkiene, and Bulko 2020; Lisa, Hennelova, and Newman 2019), South Africa (Aliu and Aigbavboa 2021; Kruss 2004), Sri Lanka (Wickramasinghe and Perera 2010), Taiwan (Hou et al. 2021, Lu 2021), Tanzania (Ishengoma and Vaaland 2016; Mgaiwa 2021), Togo (Atitsogbe et al. 2019), Tunisia (Khelifi 2022), Turkey (Ergün and Şeşen 2021), Vietnam (Nghia, Giang, and Quyen 2019; Tran 2015), Yugoslavia and its successor states (Bacevic 2014) were all identified. This includes examples from all continents.

Some research on the topic focused on particular kinds of provision or institutions, such as distance learning (Abrantes et al. 2022; Delaney and Farren 2016), research-intensive (Baker and Henson 2010; Ciriaci and Muscio 2014) and teaching-focused (Borah, Malik, and Massini 2021) universities and colleges. Some research also examined the particular experience of graduates with disabilities (Portillo-Navarro, Lagos-Rodríguez, and Meseguer-Santamaría 2022; Vincent 2020).

There were also examples of studies focusing on a varied range of disciplines, including the built environment (Aliu and Aigbavboa 2021), classics (Barrow et al. 2010), education (Alvarez-Hevia and Naylor 2019), information management (Cox, Al Daoud, and Rudd 2013), law (Russell 2011; Turner, Amirnuddin, and Singh 2019), music (Bennett 2016), politics (Lee, Foster, and Snaith 2016) and sport (Lu 2021; Sato et al. 2021), indicating the importance of employability across the curriculum.

Existing systematic reviews

There have been a number of systematic reviews of aspects of research into employability in higher education.

Artess, Hooley and Mellors-Bourne (2017), in a report for the UK’s Higher Education Academy, examined 187 articles published between 2012 and 2016. They came to very upbeat conclusions:

The employability agenda offers huge opportunities for HEPs [higher education providers], academics and students. Employability offers HEPs the opportunity to help individuals to realise their potential, to enhance their, skills, attitudes, attributes and knowledge, to become successful workers and citizens, and through this helps to increase the political legitimacy of higher education. (p. 8)

Abelha et al (2020) covered the period 2009–2019, searching with Web of Science and Scopus, and including both English and Spanish language articles (n = 69). They were less positive overall than Artess et al, recognising the differences in perceptions of higher education institutions and employers, and suggesting that the former needed to do more:

The debate about gaps between the employability competences developed in higher education and employers’ needs, and specificities associated with competence development represent the majority of the studies in the corpus of analysis. Our results suggest that higher education institutions are concerned with how to enhance the development of competences for graduate employability. (p. 16)

Other systematic reviews have been more focused. Sokhanvar, Salehi and Sokhanvar (2021) examined research into the use of authentic assessment as a means of developing employability. Targeting the 2010–2019 decade, they identified 26 relevant studies. García-Álvarez et al (2022) focused on transversal competencies, using Scopus and the Web of Science to identify 52 relevant articles published in the period 2008–2018. This allowed them to group 41 transversal competencies into 5 dimensions, and to conclude that ‘employers attributed more importance to the competencies in the dimensions of job-related basic skills, socio-relational skills, and self-management skills’ (p. 1). Morina and Biagiotti (2022) focused on graduates with disabilities, finding 18 relevant articles.

Healy, Hammer and McIlveen (2022) take a slightly different approach, in applying citation analysis to analyse 4068 articles focused on graduate employability and career development. They demonstrate that, as is not unusual in research, these two related fields have relatively little to do with each other but argue that ‘purposeful exchange between the two fields will enrich both and, when applied to practice, could inform an evidence-based, integrative pedagogy of careers and employability learning in higher education’ (p. 799).

Issues and critique

The existing research into employability in higher education raises a number of key issues and has attracted considerable critique. These points will be considered here under four main questions:

• which employability skills?

• how to develop employability?

• how to measure/assess employability?

• what is lost in focusing on employability?

These questions illustrate, amongst other things, how much variability there is in thinking about employability in higher education.

Which employability skills?

To start with, a key issue underlying the employability debate is that there is no general agreement on which skills employability encompasses, or on which of the identified skills are the most important. It depends in part on who you ask (i.e. which stakeholder?) but also on who is asking. Thus, Abbas and Sagsan (2020), in a study of Chinese employers, conclude that ‘managers in China consider “skills” as the most important dimension for employability in Chinese industrial organisations and “reliability” is the highly demanded subsequent factor’ (p. 449). Reliability seems a very low-level factor to emphasise, however, suggesting that overall employability skills levels may be fairly low.

To give a second example, Ng et al (2021) identify several employability skills, indicating how they might be developed through collaboration between higher education institutions and employers, but lay particular emphasis on the use of work-integrated learning:

the acquired employability skills of young graduates are entrepreneurship, professional development, work with others, self-management, communication and problem solving … higher education institutions should work closely with industry stakeholders to get employers engaged with the work-integrating learning (WIL) programs and subsequently equip young graduates for better employability opportunities … employability skills of communication, problem solving and self-management would be improved … entrepreneurship and problem-solving skills could further be developed for young graduating students working in SME [small and medium-sized enterprises] organizations during WIL. (p. 852)

Many other authors also offer lists of employability skills, but they vary a good deal in both terminology and what is included. It would be impractical for any higher education institution or department to seek to develop all of the skills separately identified in its students.

How to develop employability?

Like Ng et al (2021), other authors emphasise the importance of university/industry collaboration in developing employability (e.g. Aliu and Aigbavboa 2021; Borah, Malik, and Massini 2021; Ishengoma and Vaaland 2016; Jackson and Tomlinson 2022; Morley 2018; Pereira, Vilas-Boas, and Rebelo 2020). Arranz et al (2022) analysed the responses of 7036 European companies on this issue, coming up with somewhat surprising findings:

most companies are weakly linked to HEIs [higher education institutions] in terms of graduate recruitment … our findings indicate that internships are the most used mechanism … our results show that the degree of satisfaction of companies with graduates is high, both in general perception and in the competencies evaluated. (p. 997)

The weak link between companies and higher education institutions is surprising given the stress placed on the latter developing employability skills, but the finding that companies are highly satisfied with graduates and their existing competencies suggests that this stress is unnecessary.

This linkage is both contextualised and challenged by Fotiadou (2020), who analysed 2.6 million words on 58 UK university websites, focusing on their careers services and how they represented employability. Her analysis highlights the convoluted and illogical position that universities find themselves in:

According to the careers services, there is a (daunting) gap between HE [higher education] and employment that needs to be bridged in order to bring HE students closer to the real-world. It could be claimed that the gap is a social construction created by dominant groups, such as employers and governments … Employers state that they need ‘ready-to-work’ graduates. Interestingly, instead of filling this gap themselves by providing training to the new members of their teams, HEIs [higher education institutions] are expected to take this responsibility, train students and provide employable and ready-to-work graduates … In general, there seems to be a confusion between educating and training HE students in the UK. It also seems that universities have accepted the responsibility for both, but proudly advertise their expertise in the second. (p. 281)

Despite such a clear-sighted but contrary view, most of the published literature offers guidance on how employability skills might best be developed by universities and colleges. Given the evident issues with expanding collaboration between higher education institutions and employers, it is not surprising that a range of different approaches are suggested. These include most obviously work experience (Hellyer and Lee 2014; Muldoon 2009) and engagement in extra-curricular activities (Hordósy and Clark 2018; Thompson et al. 2013), both conventional activities which help to enhance one’s curriculum vitae.

More innovative (Bui, Nguyen, and Cole 2019) approaches that higher education institutions can build into the curriculum have also been suggested. These include the increased use of both formative (Yorke 2005) and peer assessment (Cassidy 2006), as these can improve students’ evaluative abilities, both of themselves and of others. Groupwork is also strongly advocated, helping to develop the teamwork skills needed in employment:

The increasing emphasis on student employability shifted the focus from increasing students’ disciplinary knowledge to providing them the opportunities to develop practical skills that are valued in the field of paid employment. On a meso level, this led to the increasing adoption of group assignments … as the means to provide students the opportunity to develop team skills. On a microlevel, alumni interviews illustrate that despite well-known challenges, group assessments provided a forum for developing team skills, an opportunity which was appreciated by the interviewees, albeit begrudgingly. (Kalfa and Taksa 2017, 697)

Higher education institutions and their employees continue, therefore, to develop their students’ employability skills through diverse means.

How to measure/assess employability?

This engagement in the employability agenda, on the part of higher education institutions and their students in particular, poses the necessity of measuring or assessing what level of employability students have developed. Instruments for doing so have been proposed (Álvarez-González, López-Miguens, and Caballero 2017; Caballero, Álvarez-González, and López-Miguens 2020), but most assessments rely on secondary forms of data. For example, Mason, Williams and Cranmer (2009) judge the success of structured work experience schemes in terms of students’ subsequent employment:

Our findings suggest that structured work experience has clear positive effects on the ability of graduates, firstly, to find employment within six months of graduation and, secondly, to secure employment in graduate-level jobs. The latter job quality measure is also positively and significantly associated with employer involvement in degree course design and delivery. (p. 23)

The significance placed on students gaining ‘graduate-level jobs’ does, however, draw attention to the impossibility of satisfying all such expectations, as ‘the size and structure of the graduate labour market means increasing graduates’ employability will not necessarily lead to enhanced employment opportunities as the number of graduates is not necessarily closely aligned to the number of graduate jobs’ (Artess, Hooley, and Mellors-Bourne 2017, 5).

There is also something rather circular about judging the usefulness of employability initiatives through the subsequent employment of the students involved. The latter might, after all, have happened anyway, and it tells us little about how useful the employability initiative was.

What is lost in focusing on employability?

However, perhaps the most important question to pose in considering the employability agenda in higher education is what do we lose in focusing on it? After all, any student’s higher education experience is necessarily constrained in practice by the amount of time and other resources that they, and their departments or institutions, have available. The higher education curriculum is effectively a ‘zero sum game’; there is only so much that can be fitted into it, and, if you add employability initiatives, something else will have to be removed to accommodate them.

What gets lost in focusing on employability, then, is mostly the discipline or subject being studied, or at least the scope and depth of it that can be studied: ‘while theories of life-long or life-wide learning position employability as an outcome of a holistic curriculum embracing both discipline and employability, stakeholders perceive learning for employability as a threat to disciplinary learning’ (Speight, Lackovic, and Cooker 2013, 112). The ‘stakeholders’ being referred to here are primarily academic and administrative university employees, but also students.

McCowan (2015) makes much the same point in contrasting the intrinsic (i.e. disciplinary) value of higher education with its instrumental value (e.g. employability, but also all of those other qualities and skills that higher education may develop): ‘the employability “agenda” should not be promoted to the extent that it undermines the core function of university in fostering understanding … the instrumental value of universities should exist alongside and emerging from its intrinsic value, rather than replacing it’ (p. 281).

More recently, Barkas and Armstrong (2022) have set out even more plainly what is lost from the higher education experience by stressing employability:

it is argued that the marketisation, commercialisation and commodification of higher education, with the resulting emphasis on economic value through the employability of graduates, has created unintended consequences in the sector. To insert employability initiatives, something has to give in the module structure so that everything can be fitted in. That ‘something’ is the sacrifice of wisdom within the deeper knowledge of a subject. (p. 51)

The blame for this state of affairs is most commonly placed on governments, nationally and internationally, and their pursuit of a neoliberal agenda:

Traditionally, universities regarded graduate employment as an aspect of institutions’ relationship with the labour market, and one where they enjoyed a significant degree of discretion. Now, employability is a performative function of universities, shaped and directed by the state, which is seeking to supplant labour markets. (Boden and Nedeva 2010, 37)

In these terms, employability is ‘part of a political agenda that wants to redefine what counts as the core environment for universities and to strengthen the influence of employers and labour market needs on higher education’ (Hartmann and Komljenovic 2021, 723). This agenda and influence is driven by the increasingly competitive environment in which higher education institutions find themselves: ‘the higher education market – not the labour market – is the key driver for universities to engage in employability and skills initiatives’ (Durazzi 2021, 386).

Curiously, what seems to be being most ignored here is the voice of a key stakeholder; the students themselves:

The dominant employability discourse argues that skills acquisition brings meritocracy to graduate employment. Students and universities are buying into a neo-liberal ideology of being competitive to secure employment and remain employable. Often, this ‘buy-in’ is reluctant … The neo-liberal ideology claims that disadvantaged groups can ‘upskill’ to a better life by developing their employability to meet employers’ needs. Employability is viewed as an individual initiative, and the individual is at fault if he or she cannot secure a job. (Higdon 2016, 191)

In the process, old patterns of preference, supported by existing contacts and networks (or ‘social capital’), are being re-emphasised. Higher education may no longer cater just for the elite, but for the mass of the population, but widened participation has not, as yet, led to a society where social justice and equity prevail.

Conclusion

This examination of the research literature on employability in higher education has placed the current discussion in the context of longer-term debates on the purposes and values of higher education. The increased emphasis on employability initiatives stresses the vocational purposes of higher education, viewing it as little more than final preparation for a lifetime of productive work.

While it would be naïve to argue, in contrast, that higher education’s primary role is the development of the individual thinker within a disciplinary perspective, a more balanced approach is surely both possible and desirable. It is the case that the majority of higher education programmes are preparing students for specific or generic vocational or professional roles. Yet, these programmes, and the higher education experience as a whole, also aim to do a lot more, and this aim should not be lost in the contemporary focus on graduate employability.

This argument is given greater weight by the research evidence showing that:

• there is no general agreement on which employability skills are most important;

• there is no compelling evidence that employability initiatives actually work, beyond what higher education already does; and

• many employers remain happy with the quality of the graduates they employ or are unwilling to engage with higher education in employability initiatives.

In this context, more emphasis might be given instead to researching the usefulness of a more conventional approach to providing higher education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).