The price of knowledge and the wisdom of innocence: A difficult journey through the employability discourse in higher education

The ‘five whys’

The root cause of the contested role of knowledge and the purpose of HE

The root cause of the loss of value of knowledge in higher education is its lack of a firm identity. Knowledge is not a product, but a ‘process of engagement with ideas, arguments and the world in which they reside’ (Hauke, 2019: 378). By using analytical metaphors, we can illustrate the reason for the root cause of uncertainty about the value of knowledge and of a higher education with employability agendas. The ‘golden thread’ that joins the three sets of artefacts together is that they centre on the same questions: what is the role of knowledge and the purpose of higher education and where, and how, can the employability agenda be implemented? In our first artefact, we examine vignettes that show the roots of the complex value universities have in society.

An examination of such artefacts over time shows how knowledge has been perceived and valued and reveals contested meanings and boundaries with regard to its position in universities’ education systems. The artefacts offer an insight into the changing value of knowledge and show how writing about knowledge is also highly contested. This conundrum is expressed by Laing (1990: 152) in The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise:

[…] This writing is not exempt. It remains like all writing, an absurd and revolting effort to make an impression on a world that will remain as unmoved as it is vivid. If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell, I would let you know.

Artefact one: The changing role of universities across time

In this section, we draw on a range of schools of thought to examine how a higher education has been perceived at different periods. Universities have long shared a troubled relationship with society (Ranson, 1998) – one that could be seen almost as schizophrenic, resulting in universities with a borderline personality disorder as they struggle to respond to the demands of all stakeholders, and thus change backwards and forwards between teaching-centred and student-centred approaches (Sin, 2014) within new and old disciplines described as ‘disembodied’ by Trowler (2014). This situation has developed because questions about the role and purpose of higher education have become increasingly complex over the years, leading to an uncertain identity that is reflected by the academics themselves. In the distant past, universities were hidden places and the knowledge contained within them was secretly guarded. Over the centuries, society’s curiosity opened them up, but only a privileged few were allowed admittance. Universities were autonomous organisations, happy to be bastions of knowledge. Cardinal John Henry Newman’s (1891: 126) much quoted statement articulates the ‘idea of a university’ centred on knowledge acquisition, with the aim of higher education provision being to develop ‘the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach towards truth, and grasp it’, whereas in Habermas’s view (1979: 101) the ideal university is one with an objective spirit: ‘…an institution remains capable of functioning only as long as it embodies in living form the idea inherent to it’.

For enlightenment thinkers, however, such as Helvetius (1758, English translation 2014) ‘l’éducation peut tout’ (education can do anything), thus providing the opportunity to create a ‘civilised world guided by reason and knowledge’. In more recent times, higher education has taken on several different identities. From a philosophical position, the value of higher education for Derrida (1976) lies in ‘deconstructing’ knowledge through post-structuralism, on the basis that the value of writing about knowledge lies in the fact that words always mean more than what is written on the page. This perspective is supported by Bakhtin’s (1984: 2) dialogic criticism viewing language as an ‘eminently social and political act’, a theory shared by Freire (1973: 3) who campaigned for critical pedagogical explorations of learning and struggle in society. However, for Handy (1991), we have entered, and not just in higher education, ‘an age of unreason’ in which logic and reason must step aside in the face of economic dominance in the marketisation of the higher education system. In the 21st century, although UK universities, for example, have charitable status, they have adopted business models to market their programmes of study.

The response to this marketisation is a deeper and more complex process of individualisation, examined in Bellah et al.’s (2007) seminal work, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, which takes its main title from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, 1835. Brown, Lauder and Ashton (2011) also refer to Tocqueville but argue that, while he celebrated the opportunities in America, he would see a vastly different world today. Writing in the UK, Ranson’s (1998) research into society’s values identified an age of professionalism (1945–1975) a period of corporatism (1970–1981 and a period of consumerism and the charter culture (1979–1990). We would like to add another age to Ranson’s model and suggest that from 1990 to 2020 there has been a period of disruption.

This period of disruption arose because of complex changes to industry across the globe and the movement from economic growth to rapid decline and austerity, resulting in pressure on universities to play a demonstrable role in improving national economic performance. These changes, which imposed deep demands on higher education, are summarised by Ball (1990) as an increase in privatisation, marketisation, differentiation, vocationalism and proletarianisation. Universities have had to grapple with these issues and contribute to the economy by designing curricula that ensure that the knowledge taught is relevant to current demands and that employment skills are embedded in whatever discipline is taught. There has been extensive debate about the validity of this approach and about how it can be done, and a challenging of the ‘cause and effect’ claims about higher education’s role in improving a society’s economy (Barnett, 2013; Brown and Carrasso, 2013; Tomlinson, 2018).

In the UK, since the Browne Review of Higher Education (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2010) and the raising of students’ fees, the necessity for university programmes to compartmentalise ‘knowledge’ still further in the credit-based system has intensified. ‘Knowledge’ in university programmes has been packaged into learning outcomes with a value as a credit. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, research by Elliot and Crossley (1997: 80) showed that society had experienced a ‘marked upsurge in instrumentalist, highly specified activities such as Training for Work and the use of competence testing, qualitative performance criteria and evidence indicators’, and the impact of this increase was also apparent in university provision. The emphasis on what knowledge is for is therefore related to what value it has in the marketplace in employment terms. Research by Brown et al. (2003) on employers’ views of skilled workers, graduates and employment data found that while there was a global demand for highly skilled workers, particularly in the scientific and technological fields, there were limited highly skilled jobs in other areas. Brown et al. (2004: 2) termed this work the ‘mismanagement of talent’, arguing that more and more graduates had been deceived into believing that there was enough work to go around and found themselves ‘in a scramble for jobs with rising stakes for the winners and losers’. Over a decade later, the situation remains the same: the nature of graduate-level jobs is highly variable. The perceived value of the work in both monetary and personal terms is also variable (Taylor, 2020; Tomlinson, 2018).

Through the next artefact we examine the nature of the discourse on skills, knowledge and their role in employability initiatives in the curriculum.

Artefact two: Discourse on skills, knowledge, and employability

The situation described above has arisen because higher education provision has been influenced by stakeholders’ demands for graduates to demonstrate ‘employment skills’. Yet the term ‘skills’ is nebulous, a word over-zealously used in what Stronach and Morris (1994) termed ‘policy hysteria’. Various political slogans emerged that bandied around the term ‘skills’ in an attempt to detract from the high levels of unemployment, even though the term held different interpretations and was utilised for different slogans. For example, ‘lack of skills’ was the reason promulgated for problems in employment throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, only for further claims to be made over the next few years (1994–97) that the real reason for high unemployment was specifically because people lacked ‘basic’ skills. Then in the late 1990s the emphasis in explaining the lack of jobs was on the notion that there was a shortage of people who had ‘high’ skills (Stronach and MacClure, 1997: 88); however, a ‘skill’ is not an act (Ryle, 1949: 33, quoted in Lum, 2004: 491). As Ainley (2000: 4) has explained, ‘personal and transferable key skills are neither personal nor transferable, nor skills, they are social and generic competences’. Skills must be contextualised within a given situation before any claim to knowledge or skill can be made. For example, it is unreasonable to claim that someone who has transferable skills in the use of cutting blades can transfer across different specific situations and also be skilled in the use of cutting tools in anything from brain to tree surgery, or from butchery to welding. Using sharp objects will require ‘high knowledge/skills’ within context, but they are not transferable out of context.

The discourse concerning what constitute appropriate transferable skills, however, and how they can be transferred, has continued over the past two decades, with ‘employability’ dominating the ‘skills debate’. This has resulted in a bewildering array of lists of skills for ‘employability’ (Holmes, 2013; Taylor, 2020). The problem in the definitions in the discourse is that, whatever the nature or level of ‘skill’, the knowledge surrounding the context cannot be ‘possessed’. As Hauke explains, engagement in knowledge acquisition is a fluid and personal interaction with engagement in a state of ‘knowing’ (Hauke, 2019: 378). In our example above, deep study and understanding of trees, metal, and the anatomy of people and animals is required during the process of learning how to use sharp blades, knives, saws and other cutting tools.

Whilst not disputing the process of ‘knowing’, the conflicting demands from employers for universities to develop tacit ‘soft skills’ and ‘behaviours’ have been driven by the wider skills debates. This is illustrated by the introduction of the degree apprenticeship in the UK, a method of upskilling by building partnerships between universities, professional bodies, and employers – a deliberate act to move universities towards being guardians of tacit skill development, which could be seen as a cultural shift for universities. On the one hand, ‘skills’ have to be ‘demonstrated’, but on the other hand ‘soft skills’ are also monitored and evaluated. This also illustrates the schizophrenic relationship between universities and their stakeholders.

The ‘student as consumer’ rhetoric and the need for universities to comply with consumer law have formalised the neoliberal economic emphasis on the link between money and outcomes (Ball, 2017). To find the ‘root cause’ of why this rhetoric has changed the value of knowledge to an individual, we continue to explore its role as a priced commodity.

Universities, then, strive to compete with each other to gain the advantage in attempting to meet the needs of an increasingly complex range of stakeholders. These stakeholders consist of governments, governors, employers, students and researchers, resulting in an overarching higher education policy that ‘continues to hover uncertainly between a complex set of economic and social expectations’ (Ball, 2017: 4). Over the past few decades, the language used to describe knowledge has therefore also changed to emphasise rhetorical strategies that depict higher education as a product to ‘market’. As Hauke (2019) argues, acquiring knowledge is not a product but a process, so the rhetoric surrounding the marketing of higher education is deeply flawed (Collini, 2012; Sellar, 2013). Nonetheless, the rhetorical discourse about the failure of higher education to respond to the current ‘markets’ has brought about cultural changes in expectations and the introduction of regulatory departments such as the UK’s Office for Students (2021). The design of higher education programmes and the regulations associated with them, therefore, must demonstrate ‘value for money’; the knowledge contained in them is priced against the value it has in the marketplace (Barkas et al., 2017). In this instrumental rationality, skills dominate knowledge, functionalism is valued over intellectualism and employability is valued over critical self-reflection (O’Byrne and Bond, 2014: 580).

However, over the past decades the envisaged identity of the university has shifted from a focus on the knowledge institution to the employability institution. As transnational and multinational corporations have grown and have become embroiled in global marketisation, there has been a devaluing of knowledge unless it has an immediate purpose (Drucker, 1969; Young and Muller, 2010). The result is a complex and contested discourse on what should be taught in universities, and what knowledge is valued by employers – a discourse described by Brown et al. (2008: 1) as a ‘knowledge war’.

Since the 1960s the term ‘knowledge-based economy’ has remained in vogue in a number of different areas, but its predominant use is in relation to employers seeking highly skilled workers – characterised by Brown et al. (2008: 139) as ‘digital Taylorism’ and ‘the global auction for jobs, the broken promise of education, jobs, and incomes’ (Brown et al., 2011: 2). Different perceptions of knowledge reflect the various stakeholders’ views but, as the philosophers Giarelli and Chambliss (1991: 264) remind us, perceptual fields are ‘experienced as wholes’.

‘Knowledge’ in higher education, then, is marketed as a product, but its value lies in its purpose. The role of knowledge is ‘experienced’ in a hermeneutic interpretation of text that involves ‘a spiral of stages’ as a deeper meaning of the words in the document is sought (Foster, 1994). In this way, because the meaning and purpose of higher education courses and programmes and their role in economic development have been written about so extensively, the curricula have been subject to constant change. The deeper meaning of knowledge itself therefore becomes a victim, ‘spiralling’ into oblivion inside the bureaucratic justifications of courses and programmes.

In widening participation agendas, the impact of the discourse of employability, knowledge and skills development on the higher education curriculum, therefore, has a long and complex history (Barkas, 2011a). Widening participation has been a key focus of governments’ higher education policies for the past two decades. At the core of initiatives to open up higher education is the belief that more graduates in the workforce will enable societies to become more competitive in the increasingly global market (HEFCE, 2011; Teiseria et al., 2017; UK Research and Innovation, 2020). This belief, however, has resulted in a confused discourse, in which ‘many terms in use in policy texts and analysis are slippery, and consequently meanings are often elusive’ (Ball, 2017: 9). The result is that ‘policy strategies, Acts of Parliament, guidelines and initiatives are often messy, contradictory, confused and unclear’ (Ball, 2017: 11).

Against this background, Mavelli (2014) examines widening participation with reference to Foucault’s work and his distinction between savoir and connaissance, the former constituting an individual process and the latter an instrumental, external commodity. The dominant discourse concerning the value of a graduate qualification now embraces both savoir and connaissance interpretations of knowledge. In practical terms, this means that, while students choose their degree pathway from a personal perspective (savoir), their qualification is also a commodity (connaissance) to be ‘traded’ in the job market.

In other words, what could be envisaged as policy for national development in the early 1980s, opening up opportunities for a higher education, has now become an international priority. Graduates must now be equipped with knowledge and skills that will enable them to apply for jobs with multinational enterprises that have offices in several different countries, and so graduate competition for jobs is international (see inter alia Brown et al., 2004; Hensley et al., 2013; Macfarlane and Tomlinson, 2017; Wilkins and Burke, 2013; Yorke and Knight, 2007). During the past two decades, there have been continuing intensive debates about the challenges universities face in designing courses and programmes to respond to the changing nature of global employment patterns (see inter alia, Mills, 2007, Robinson and Hilli, 2016). In the UK, as the Browne (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2011) reforms of higher education financing have taken shape, universities have striven to secure new revenue streams and commercial relationships to meet ‘key performance indicators’ and accommodate budget demands.

The ‘employability’ issue has, therefore, been both an area of concern for academics and a key focus for curriculum developers for some time (Barnett, 1990; Brown et al., 2003; Holmes, 2013). One difficulty with the term ‘employability’ is that is used both generically and specifically, and without a commonly accepted definition. It was used in the early part of the twentieth century to describe the probability of gaining employment, but is now used to refer to the characteristics that enhance the individual’s performance in the world of work (Hillage et al., 1998; Tomlinson, 2012). In the UK, ensuring that higher education programmes provide a means of developing ‘employment skills’ is emphasised as a priority by the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). In QAA (2018: 12) documentation, programme designers are requested to show ‘clear links between subjects and career planning’ and the HEFCE stated that:

Embedding employability into the core of the higher education system will continue to be a key priority of Government, universities and colleges, and employers. This will bring both significant private and public benefit, demonstrating higher education’s broader role in contributing to economic growth as well as its vital role in social and cultural development. (HEFCE, 2011: 4).

The discourse on learning outcomes and ‘value added’ components for the employability of graduates dominate current narratives. Reactions to the employability drivers in the curriculum have led to challenges for students in their studies. In our final artefact, we examine ‘why’ students feelings about their education have changed. We draw on the insights provided by three different but related studies that were conducted during the embedding of employability initiatives into the curriculum in the UK. As research by Hauke (2019: 379) has shown, knowledge building is not a passive journey; students must find their own way by ‘critiquing their own resources’.

Artefact three: Students’ feelings about knowledge and employability – insights from highlights

In this section, we bring together a bricolage of insights from highlights of our research conducted over the past few years which, when combined into one ‘artefactual tool’, show how students worry about their studies. The studies chosen all took place during the period of disruption in writing about higher education that we claim occurred from 1990 to 2020.

The research studies underpin the arguments presented in this paper and are related to the authors’ current work on how small changes in the curriculum can further support inclusion policies within the employment rhetoric. The highlighted insights are summarised below: these are presented because they reflect how students feel about their studies. The emotional thread connecting the studies is ‘anxiety’ and it provides evidence to explain why the ‘space’ for learning is needed.

Other studies

Brown et al. (2003) also shows how students react differently to their employability potential. They use the term ‘purists’ to describe students/graduates who do not compete with their peers for employment and ‘players’ for those who act more strategically for personal employment development. Our research supports this perspective: Study 3 above concentrated on students’ feelings regarding their sense of inclusion in higher education (Barkas et al., 2017, 2018). While the students were ignorant of the tensions bubbling in academia about how their course of study was being presented, they wanted to understand the knowledge that was being imparted to them. The study examined how their motivation was affected by their feelings of inclusion or exclusion. The more intrinsically motivated students became agitated if they felt they were not learning their subject deeply enough and corresponded to the ‘purists’ in Brown et al.’s (2003) study, whereas the students oriented towards performance goals aligned with the ‘players’.

The importance of a ‘space to learn’ is also acknowledged by several authors, including Bernard and Thornton:

…there seems to be increasing stress for young people today and this needs to be factored into the programme. If a space can be created for them where they feel confident, it can give them a sense of being anchored. (Bernard and Thornton, 2020: 231)

Expression and reflection are critical elements in students’ learning, allowing them to understand their deep-seated unconscious values, beliefs and emotions (Armstrong, 2015). In the art-based research Armstrong (2018: 2) also found that a reflexive conversation through a collaborative autoethnographic methodology allowed for the construction of identity, and it is a stronger identity that is now needed for higher education. To return to our metaphor once again, this identity challenge for higher education lies in making sense of the schizophrenia-inducing push and pull from its various stakeholders. Universities have been forced into multiple and complex identities framed around a range of these push and pull factors (e.g. key performance indicators, league tables, employability initiatives and research output that can be commodified). Bernard and Thornton (2020: 235), describing the development of their Master’s programme ‘Cultural Intelligence and Innovation’, explain how, over the decades, their workplace, now known as l’Université de Paris, has ‘historically been associated with disruption’ and has used its tradition of ‘indiscipline’ to develop an interdisciplinary culture which enables cross-disciplinary studies and militates against the ‘silo effect of specialization’. In their paper they demonstrate how, by studying the humanities alongside the core subject, students can develop into socially literate and creative graduates who can, in their workplace, draw on the empathy and sensibility they have developed through their university studies.

Conclusion

In her book The March of Folly from Troy to Vietnam, Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Tuchman (1984: 484) examines the folly of government decisions that led to disastrous outcomes and states ‘factors other than random selection subdue the influence of the “thinking fire” on public affairs’. By this, she means that citizens in power may often abuse their authority, and thus bring about a state of affairs that will have terrible outcomes. She suggests that ‘the problem may be not so much a matter of educating officials for government as educating the electorate to recognise and reward integrity of character and to reject the ersatz’ (Tuchman, 1984: 485). To be able to recognise truth from falsehood in scenarios, as described by Tuchman, educational frameworks must instigate problem solving questions. To bring this to fruition, it is necessary to bring the humanities and critical reasoning strongly into higher education curricula. If most students can be classified as ‘purists’ who want to focus on knowledge acquisition, and are supported by academic staff who are equally ‘purist’ and want to pursue knowledge, how can this integrity with regard to the value of knowledge be repositioned in higher education? To re-evaluate the importance of a higher education, emphasis must be placed on the value of inquiry and depth of understanding. While still ensuring that graduates have the knowledge and skills they need to secure a job and a make a worthwhile contribution to society, knowledge of the subject must lead, not follow, an employability agenda. To bring such a realignment, O’Byrne and Bond (2014: 571) propose a ‘trialogue’ – a three-way conversation – about the future of higher education. They argue that the development of higher education is fractious because it is endeavouring to meet the demands of stakeholders within competing paradigms: intellectual, managerial, and consumerist (O’Byrne and Bond, 2014: 577). O’Bryne and Bond therefore stress that what is needed is a deeper conversation among the stakeholders, arguing that

the university must first and foremost be valued as site where ideas are discussed, prejudices challenged and knowledge produced – knowledge which may or may not be of direct functional benefit to the government or industry, but which is not measured according to those criteria, because it is recognised as carrying its own inherent value. (O’Byrne and Bond 2014: 581)

Curricula will, indeed, have to be redesigned in any case to compensate for the lack of work placements that may result from the impact of COVID-19. For example, Taylor (2020) suggests a cross-disciplinary Peer Enhanced e-Placement (PEEP) structure as a way to give students a structured work experience involving teamwork, interpersonal skills, listening, problem solving and taking responsibility – but in a digital environment.

For knowledge to regain its rightful place, however, at the centre of ‘learning organisations’ (Senge, 1993) the ‘taken for granted role of employability’ in higher education must be deeply analysed by all stakeholders; otherwise, the role of employment skills development in higher education induces a ‘learning disability’ (Senge, 1993: 18) and leaves knowledge a ‘prisoner in the system’ (Senge, 1993: 27).

The necessary, deeper awareness required of how the unintended destruction of knowledge has come about can, then, be achieved through the ‘trialogue’ of the kind proposed by O’Byrne and Bond (2014) between government, employers, and higher education providers in a process of reflexivity. Reflexivity involves a questioning of what has been taken for granted – in this case, re-evaluating the place of knowledge in the dominant discourse concerning employability. The questioning and challenging of the value of knowledge needs to be revisited as universities find themselves in the throes of conflicting tensions, with the value of knowledge and wisdom becoming obscured by the latest skills. agenda. Universities are fighting to position themselves in an increasingly crowded marketplace to offer knowledge, but with the additional pressure of having to respond to ‘customers’ who are increasingly influential (in England, within the regulatory framework of the Office for Students, 2020).

Students entering the higher education system today face many pressures. Understandably, they are not aware of the intense pressures underlying the curriculum as it is twisted and turned to meet the demands of the various stakeholders. In their wisdom, many students return inwards to find a quiet place, maybe in a room, or a park, or simply ‘turning inward’ into a sacred space within their own mind, to reflect on the knowledge presented to them. Higher education curricula are much in need of such quiet places so that the future can mark a ‘return to knowledge’.

To add a simile from nature to our metaphorical framing of the disturbed mind, a university could be seen as an ecosystem in which there is an imbalance which is diminishing knowledge and wisdom – an imbalance precipitated by employability initiatives based on the conflicting demands of government, employers, and students (current and prospective). University managers navigate a confusing journey as they strive to market an image of the university that will satisfy these conflicting demands, finding themselves schizophrenically torn between the perspectives of the public good of knowledge and the private good of employability.

As teachers in higher education, we recognise the conflicting identities that universities have to portray and we live with this ‘borderline personality disorder’ inducing set of demands. We have argued that a better way needs to be found – and that finding this better way requires identification of the ‘root cause’ of the conflicting discourses. In the meantime, we return to Laing’s (1990: 152) words – our attempt to find the better way is an ‘absurd and revolting effort’ to question why knowledge appears undervalued in a ‘knowledge institution’. We need to move away from a situation in which, instead of being seen as innovative and creative guides, and enablers of the public good of knowledge creation, researchers who question the status quo become, as Freire (1973) argued almost 50 years ago, silenced.