{"id":1036,"date":"2023-11-16T12:15:25","date_gmt":"2023-11-16T12:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/?p=1036"},"modified":"2023-10-27T12:14:21","modified_gmt":"2023-10-27T11:14:21","slug":"why-the-he-skills-debate-is-a-false-dichotomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/2023\/11\/16\/why-the-he-skills-debate-is-a-false-dichotomy\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the HE skills debate is a false dichotomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

To celebrate Professor Rajani Naidoo<\/a>\u2019s appearance at the Going Global 2023 conference<\/a>, throughout November we\u2019re spotlighting the International Centre for Higher Education Management<\/a> (ICHEM).<\/em><\/p>\n

In this post, Director of Higher Education Management Programmes Dr Dan Davies<\/a> argues against the positioning of higher and further education in opposition to one another.<\/em><\/p>\n

One of the ways in which higher education (HE) has traditionally been thought of as contributing to the global good is through the supply of highly skilled graduates able to take up roles in healthcare, education and the knowledge economy \u2013 thereby driving social and economic development.<\/p>\n

However, this rationale has become increasingly clouded by the employability agenda \u2013 specifically a focus on graduate salaries as a proxy measure for the quality of university courses \u2013 with its instrumental focus on the \u2018private good\u2019 of students\u2019 careers. Some question whether HE massification has gone \u2018too far\u2019 at the expense of the technical and vocational skills demanded by industry, which education systems such as Germany\u2019s seem so good at supplying outside the university sector. This has been associated in the UK with a call for a return to apprenticeships, the closure of \u2018low value\u2019 university courses and moves to \u2018rebalance\u2019 the sector towards further rather than higher education.<\/p>\n

This sets up a false dichotomy between the academic and the vocational, while attempts to restrict access to university education inevitably restrict social mobility. Increasingly the \u2018hard skills\u2019 employers are assumed to favour are those being overtaken by technology, while the \u2018soft skills\u2019 of creativity and emotional intelligence are precisely those attributes that HE is best able to develop.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Liberal and industrial<\/h3>\n

The skills debate is hardly new, reflecting two long-standing and competing rationales for education: the \u2018liberal educators\u2019 on one side advocating the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and the \u2018industrial trainers\u2019 on the other to produce employable graduates. Traditional, pre-industrial HE focused on the pursuits of the mind, such as theology, classics and philosophy. The swing towards an industrial trainers\u2019 perspective began with the Industrial Revolution in Europe, which generated a new kind of \u2018technological\u2019 university teaching science, engineering, medicine and other employability-focused disciplines.<\/p>\n

Yet there remained, at least in England, a social class divide between what were considered \u2018professions\u2019 and \u2018trades\u2019, with the latter seen as better trained through apprenticeships or technical colleges \u00a0\u2013 \u2018further\u2019 rather than \u2018higher\u2019 education. Engineering in this context remained something of an anomaly, encompassing the social spectrum from slide rule to oily rag. Perhaps it is the ambiguity of the term \u2018engineer\u2019 that makes UK-based engineering courses so difficult to recruit to: the term carries no such class or gender baggage in India, which produces around 25% of the world\u2019s engineering graduates.<\/p>\n

The British snobbery towards technical and vocational education has continued to bedevil its further education (FE) sector since 1851, when The Great Exhibition \u2013 which was designed to demonstrate the superiority of UK design and manufacture \u2013 revealed that it was being overtaken by economies with better skills training, such as Germany. The moral panic that ensued has led to over a century and a half of tinkering with the FE sector \u2013 during my own career there have been at least eight major reforms of vocational education. Arguably, these have all had the purpose of bringing \u2018parity of esteem\u2019 with higher education, but have foundered on deep-seated cultural prejudices.<\/p>\n

It cannot have helped that during this period the UK has become a largely post-industrial economy. It is surely no coincidence that the most rapid period of UK de-industrialisation \u2013 the 1980s \u2013 was followed in 1992 by the abolition of the \u2018binary line\u2019 between polytechnics and universities, with the recognition that a higher percentage of young people would require a university education to meet the demands of the emerging \u2018knowledge economy\u2019.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Old and new<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Yet the derogatory use of the term \u2018poly\u2019 has merely morphed into the coded references to \u2018old and new\u2019 or \u2018pre-92 and post-92\u2019 universities. Over 30 years on and despite the overtaking of several \u2018old\u2019 by \u2018new\u2019 universities in national rankings, there is still marked social stratification within the English HE sector, particularly between the Russell Group and \u2018the rest\u2019.<\/p>\n

Recent government criticism of \u2018low-value\u2019 courses \u2013 which follows a media trend back to 1992 ridiculing \u2018Mickey Mouse degrees\u2019 \u2013 is covertly aimed at post-\u201992 providers, with their broader social mix and market-sensitive offerings. The not-so-hidden discourse here is that, while middle-class kids continue to go to \u2018proper\u2019 universities to maintain social stratification in the professions, the working class are getting \u2018above themselves\u2019 to aspire to university education and are thereby being exploited by dodgy ex-polys when they would be better served training to be plumbers.<\/p>\n

Yet the demand for HE continues to grow globally; there are several successful economies with much higher participation rates than the UK\u2019s, suggesting that there are no natural limits to social mobility and that an academic education can also be one that is competency-based. The rise of micro-credentials and digital badges incorporated within \u2013 or sitting alongside \u2013 degree programmes can meet the needs of employers with skills-based hiring approaches.<\/p>\n

The work of Ward et al. (2022) in a recent ICHEM research project on skills profiling<\/a> has demonstrated how in the fast-paced IT sector six UK universities have personalised their computing degrees with micro-credential badging to meet changing industry needs. These are so-called 21st<\/sup> Century skills: domain-specific competencies together with transferrable graduate attributes such as leadership, self-regulation and adaptability.<\/p>\n

There is no conflict here with the need for more plumbers \u2013 which in the UK was probably caused by Brexit \u2013 since the global tech sector can probably absorb infinitely more graduates than the future drought-stricken bathrooms of the world can plumbing skills.<\/p>\n

Just because a performing arts graduate from a post-\u201992 university may not be in professional employment six months after graduation, it does not mean that their course was \u2018low-value\u2019; after all, the UK arts and culture sector has grown by 10% per year and estimates of its contribution vary between \u00a310 and \u00a3100 billion. Pitting FE and HE against each other in a \u2018skills culture war\u2019 as in the response to the 2019 Augar report<\/a> is not only disingenuous after decades of underfunding of the FE sector, but counterproductive when we consider the kinds of skills that the so-called \u20184th<\/sup> industrial revolution\u2019 will require.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To celebrate Professor Rajani Naidoo\u2019s appearance at the Going Global 2023 conference, throughout November we\u2019re spotlighting the International Centre for Higher Education Management (ICHEM). In this post, Director of Higher Education Management Programmes Dr Dan Davies argues against the positioning...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1377,"featured_media":1037,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[36,239,276,226],"tags":[5,52,124,71],"class_list":["post-1036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-higher-education","category-ichem","category-leadership","tag-business-schools","tag-higher-education","tag-policy","tag-regulation"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/133\/2023\/10\/pexels-emily-ranquist-1205651.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd4Pj1-gI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1377"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}