What do we want from a discipline-based education? What do we need?

There is an emergent body of literature seeking to address the educational conundrum of how an undergraduate or postgraduate level university qualification – and in particular (though certainly not exclusively) one in the arts and humanities – translates into work and career success, aka, the discourse of ‘what will you do with that?’ (e.g. Basalla and Debelius, 2007; Kent, 2012). This trend most often taps the complexities of the mapping exercise required to build links between discipline-based (rather than profession-based) courses of university study at undergraduate or postgraduate level and remunerative work. It would be a reasonable assumption that students of accounting and law would regularly join accountancy and law firms upon completion of their degrees, but students of literature and mathematics have no such semantically clear path of transition. This is of course a matter of great individual concern, but at a macro level, it is perhaps more distressing that the language deployed to explore the issues inherent in these more complex transitions converges on the archetypal language of doubt, embracing and attempting to re-value the voice of the concerned authority fearing for the student’s future welfare.

In spite of the positive and empowering message that usually lies behind such titles as these, the fact remains that authorities are still acting out their concerns about the utility (or lack thereof) of certain courses of study. In Ireland, for example, 2012 saw a controversial exercise organised by the Department of Education, which implemented a direct ‘points bonus’ for students choosing to include higher-level mathematics among the subjects they were tested on for their secondary school Leaving Certificate (Irish Times, 22 August 2012). The move was defended in strident terms by the government’s experts, who ‘challeng[ed] the “widespread, false and dangerous view” that maths is just another subject… it… develops vital intellectual capabilities and is critical for Ireland’s economic development’ (Flynn, 2012).

While it may be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc, there is certainly at the very least an eerie echo of this government-sanctioned stance on some disciplines being more desirable or economically important than others to be heard in next round of results emerging from the Central Applications Office, the body responsible for translating student scores on the Leaving Certificate into university programme acceptances. Not only did many students avail themselves of the mathematics bonus points, they also demonstrated a greatly increased demand for science courses. This trend reflected another, more subtle and indeed unintentional form of social shaping, whereby students began using the potentially flawed indicators of last year’s points (Flynn, 2013) or greater confidence in the recruitment market for science graduates than for traditional careers like law and the public sector (Holden, 2013) as a basis for one of the most influential choices in their lives so far. That aspirant Irish university entrants had, as one reporter phrased it, ‘an ear to the news and an eye on the jobs market’ (Faller, 2012) was clear – but this without any empirical or other evidence that today’s headlines and employment ads provided any insight on the learning opportunity that would, at least in theory, best launch them onto a career path of 30 or more years.

So the key question in Ireland, as elsewhere, is really not ‘what will you do with that?’ but ‘how can you know what you will do?’ To put it less succinctly, who, or what kind of system can foster the capacity for broad comprehension and intellectual confidence reaching beyond a mastery of facts, a system where students are encouraged to view their education as the opportunity to develop competencies and critical practices, rather than merely to acquire a disciplinary knowledge base or professional preparation. For it is at this level, that of the competencies and of the ‘habits of mind’ a disciplinary course of study instills, that the employment opportunities, and, more importantly, the hugely powerful linkage between individual strengths, motivation and productive contribution to the economy and society, actually can be harnessed.

There is a long tradition of ‘defending’ certain disciplines, in particular the arts and humanities, as either highly relevant to professional success or so intrinsically valuable as to not need to make a case for their relevance. If the Irish case is an example (and indeed the Irish context seems in many ways far more sympathetic than that of many of its neighbours) then clearly these voices have yet to be heard. But is the issue a lack of evidence for these defensive positions, or a lack of understanding of the translational element, the alchemical process which transforms the graduate of a basic discipline into a contributing worker?

In 2012, a group of Spanish researchers took on the question of the value of the disciplines from an economic analytic standpoint (Teijeiro et al., 2013). Over the course of several linked studies, they developed a list of the characteristic employers wanted in graduate hires and they matched those qualities onto a population of undergraduates. ¹ Their results confirmed a number of things which are often said, but seem far less often to be acted upon: that the most relevant competencies in the labour market – from the employer’s perspective – are predominantly of the systemic type, i.e. transferable personal competencies; that consensus around what these traits are relatively strong across sectors; and that this apparent consensus in the labour market is not necessarily reflected in either the policy landscape or education systems. The list they developed in 2007 is as follows:

Instrumental

Basic knowledge of the profession

Ability to communicate

Problem solving

Ability to organise and plan

Decision making

Information management abilities

Ability to analyse and synthesise

Interpersonal

Ability to work as a team

Interpersonal abilities

Systemic

Ethical commitment

Responsibility at work

Ability to learn

Motivation for work

Concern about quality and improvement

Ability to apply knowledge to practical situations

Motivation to reach goals

Ability to adapt to new situations

Ability to work independently

Ability to generate new ideas

Of these, ability to learn was deemed to be the most important.

The problem is not that we have not had such lists before. Indeed, at the level of the European Union, we do have a ‘Reference Framework for Key Competences,’ which highlights abilities that are ‘essential in a knowledge society and guarantee more flexibility in the labour force, allowing it to adapt more quickly to constant changes in an increasingly interconnected world’ (European Commission, 2006). But we also have a ‘Skills Panorama’ designed to ‘highlight the fastest growing occupations as well as the top “bottleneck” occupations’ (European Commission, 2012a). Any potential overlap between these similar-sounding policy instruments is removed in the press release announcing the creation of the Skills Panorama, which stated that: ‘the Skills Panorama shows that the occupations with the most unfilled vacancies in the EU today are those of finance and sales professional’s (European Commission, 2012b). We find ourselves with this statement rather far from the key measure of whether someone has ‘learned to learn.’

This tension is not unique to European policy, however, in fact, it is endemic to a certain combination of tensions, between short and long term time horizons, and between national and supernational approaches to learning, education and training policy, where the former tend to be more based on an attitude of social democratic ideals and the latter on a far more instrumental, neo-liberal welfare reform approach (Griffin, 2010). Differences also arise from the different levels and loci of investment these two contexts require: at the level of the OECD or UNESCO, there is no direct political capital that must be maintained through policies on education and learning, whereas at the national level (especially in a small country like Ireland) the requirement to show responsible investment of taxpayer money is a political as much as a social imperative.

Even in the medium term perspective, such policies can be easily demonstrated to be misguided. Politicians may declare their commitment to the creation of more engineering graduates in order to meet specific sectorial skills need, for example, but there is very clear evidence that those graduates themselves are unsure of exactly what their training has done for them: according to one study, only 42% of undergraduate engineering programme graduates actually intended, at completion of their degree, to pursue a career path in engineering (Lichtenstein et al., 2009). Another showed that 10 years after entering the work force, a further 50% of those (with the exception of architectural engineers) will have left the field (Frehill, 2010). Clearly, the model of learning/education as professional formation and as the guarantor of immediate job market insertion is flawed, or at least not fit for the purposes of our twenty-first century economy, not to mention our society. Yet the impression that engineers would have an advantage over graduates from the liberal arts and sciences in the job market at short or long terms would be widely accepted.

If therefore the policy-makers too are acting in accordance with the siren songs heard via their ‘ear to the news and an eye on the jobs market,’ then the need is that much greater to find more appropriate tools to guide investment in learning for social and individual economic benefit. And it is on this same question of what determines value for money in supporting a learner in their path toward competence that the economic literature becomes particularly inconclusive. Much of the discourse among educational economists on the topic digresses from these core concerns of how higher education contributes to short-term employability and longer term career building. One such relevant digression is that of the question of ‘educational mismatch,’ sometimes defined as overeducation for a particular role, sometimes as education based in one field or discipline being utilised in a professional context with which it seems to have little overlap. The research in this field is not merely inconclusive, but in fact contradictory, and deeply problematic when viewed holistically. First of all, the effect of the mismatch is, by and large, viewed in economic terms only (Lamo and Messina, 2010; Noorden et al., 2010) and at a relatively short time span (that is 6–10 years after the conclusion of secondary education) (Dolton and Vignoles, 2000; Yakusheva, 2010). But the definitions applied – of key concepts like education, mismatch and penalty – are all open to some interpretation in these studies. The research is also by and large limited by its superintending interpretation of mismatch as almost necessarily a forced choice. It may well be that certain career paths bend around other factors than economic gain, and that certain professional, as well as educational, choices are driven by ethical, personal or other non-economic factors. One scholar, in attempting to address this bias actually highlights it all the more strongly: ‘Standard economic theory postulates that utility from work, measured as job satisfaction, depends positively on income and negatively on working hours, and it also depends on a set of other job-specific and worker-specific characteristics. Most of the discussion has focused on the effects of observable job/individual attributes such as gender, age, health, wages, working hours and trade union membership’ (Fabra and Camison, 2009). What about a measure which teases out the relationship between job satisfaction and opportunities for creative expression, independence or values-centred work?

The question of what overeducation for a job role might be and might imply forms a sub-theme in this literature – and here too there is no consensus, with varying studies returning negative results (Buechel, 2002), moderately positive results (Vahey, 1998) or quite positive results for the individual and the employer (Kampelman and Rycx, 2012). In addition, some of the categories deployed in this research seem yet again prone to introducing error: for example, while it is easy to imagine a career path as an ‘Environmental Engineer’, comparable categories of occupation such as ‘Historian’ don’t seem to exist in reality in the same manner. So the interpretive leap from discipline of study to sector of work is also undertheorised, it seems. One author concludes from this that some disciplines are ‘inherently less marketable’ (Yakusheva, 2010), but such a depiction elides the possibility that they may simply not be intended as a professional formation, or may look profession-based, but prove themselves instead much more broadly applicable, as in the case of the leaky pipeline for engineers. This is an important distinction, and one which another author in the recent literature picks up, but does not develop, in the recognition that some educational pathways seem more inclined to ending in a ‘mismatch’ penalty: ‘Graduates from majors that emphasize general skills (e.g., liberal arts) have a higher likelihood of mismatch, but relatively low costs to be mismatched’ (Robst, 2006). This finding points in two equally intriguing directions: first of all, in a job market which is ever-shifting, it would seem that the greatest long term return on education would come where the lowest penalty is for switching applications of it, that is career paths, something an individual is now predicted to do multiple times over the course of a longer working life. Secondly, individuals do not always choose their occupations as direct extensions of the content of their learning context, but as a result of the convergence of chance, preparation and a multifactorial mix of their life circumstances some years after the discipline of study was chosen. Having potentially chosen against the grain of received knowledge regarding potential economic success, the liberal arts and sciences graduate may be better placed to choose again according to an economically inconsistent pattern.

This trajectory leads away from the economics of education to the economics of happiness. Seminal works by Oswald and his collaborators do not point to a direct correlation between education (over, under or otherwise) and later job satisfaction/productivity – indeed they seem to show the opposite: in British data the impact of years of education on satisfaction is negative (Clark and Oswald, 1996). ‘Schooling apparently does not directly buy happiness at work; it procures a larger salary and also raises expectations of what someone thinks they should receive’ (Blanchflower and Oswald, 1999). But there are factors on the level of developed competence, far removed from the simple ability to position oneself for a high paying role, where a more interesting possible correlation may be drawn: ‘As would be guessed, human beings like to work independently and in workplaces with high pay and good chances of advancement. They also like to “help people” and to work in healthy rather than unhealthy conditions’ (Blanchflower and Oswald, 1999). This perspective appears to represent progress – we can now conceive of human beings as more complex social animals, who react positively to independence and agency. But the enduring tendency to collapse satisfaction into economic performance is still disturbing, especially in light of some of the now unquestioned ‘classical’ ideas of organisational behaviour (such as Herzberg’s in two-factor theory). Human beings may be motivated by their economic success relative to those around them (not by overall economic success, as Clark and Oswald (2001) have also shown) but this is accounted for at the end of the day in the category Herzberg refers to as ‘hygiene factors’, necessary preconditions, perhaps, for satisfaction, but neutral in their ability to create sustained engagement (Herzberg et al., 1959). If we reverse this, and think about Herzberg’s motivating factors, like responsibility and achievement, then there is one final result from Oswald’s work which is worth noting: in looking at levels of job satisfaction among workers, one of the leading indicators he found was self-employment – in spite of the financial risk and the inherent loneliness of the entrepreneur, this cohort showed among the highest levels of job satisfaction (Blanchflower and Oswald, 1998).

Having established a lack of consensus on educational mismatches and overeducation, it is useful to revisit the results of the Spanish study on competencies, in particular the mapping of undergraduate competency development by discipline of study. Indeed, in terms of competences, the results are not what national policies and student choices in recent Irish CAO rounds would lead you to expect. In fact, while the highest scores are concentrated in the biohealth area (5.061), they are followed immediately by the humanities (5.043), then the sciences (4.886), engineering (4.608) and finally the social sciences (4.582).

These findings were confirmed in a 2013 study at Trinity College Dublin (McTiernan, forthcoming). The study was designed to capture the problem-solving strategies of five discipline-based cohorts of upper level undergraduates (based on sociology, clinical speech, basic science, computer engineering and drama), and analyse whether or not there were identifiably discipline-specific patterns of approach. Although all five groups demonstrated some aspects of functional fixedness, they also each demonstrated notably discipline-specific strategies in their approach to generic problems: in sociology, the social context of the problem setter was invoked; in drama, a medical problem was addressed by miming the act of putting on gloves; in clinical speech, a problem with a medical context provoked discussion of who might liaise with the patient’s family, etc. The greatest difference, however, was noted between those groups where awareness of the limitations of their knowledge base led to negativity and frustration as opposed to the two groups (drama and computer engineering) which seemed to have developed inherently extensible disciplinary approaches. The power of these two cohorts to reach beyond their specific knowledge bases, either by directly challenging the paradigm or by assuming a role from which to adopt a new solving paradigm, was significant.

The results of this project were launched in a public event in April 2013, which brought together a diverse group of educators, members of the policy-making community, educational and behavioural psychologists, university administrators and other entrepreneurs, human resource experts and other business leaders. In an attempt to firmly locate the widespread perception communicated by the policy landscape that science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects were somehow more necessary for economy and society, panelists were asked to respond in a semi-prepared way to questions of how education within a certain discipline does or does not support the development of a successful (if potentially unexpected) career. Although the perspectives were intentionally personal and anecdotal, from individuals across a range of disciplines, sectors and career stages, a surprising consensus on the key issues emerged among them.

First, there was a recognition of the existence of perceived cultural divisions in both the academy and in the world of work, silos of information and abilities which should be working together, but find themselves instead separated by custom and habit. Various panelists described a process of recognising and overcoming these divisions in their organisation or cultural ecosystem, and what richness this process of fusion was able to reveal. Perhaps in recognition of this, one of the most important skills highlighted was the ability to communicate effectively – as an actor, a salesman, a teacher or a journalist. The importance of mentors and networks also came across very strongly as a hallmark of a productive career path, both for the informal learning that occurs through them, and for the pathways one individual can open (intentionally or unintentionally) for another. Empathy and ‘emotional literacy’ were two further key capacities which fell outside of the university curriculum. The final set of characteristics to come through for all of the panelists was an openness to failure and tolerance for risk, including most importantly the willingness to build their career on what they loved, rather than a perception of security or utility in a particular career path.

In general, the connection between formal education and career (as opposed to personal development) was felt to be tenuous. The world’s problems were not seen to map well onto the disciplines of the university, and the most relevant education was often felt to have occurred outside of the classroom. Finally, the structure of the disciplines was suggested to be potentially antithetical to learning, due to the ‘nomadic nature of thought,’ which resisted in its essence any professionalisation.

From the employer perspective, a certain exhaustion with lists of competencies was noted. Instead, a typology of ‘minds’ was suggested, drawing upon the work of Howard Gardener (2009), which echoed many of the themes in the others’ remarks:

a discipline mind (way of thinking or a craft), as the most valuable asset acquired from an undergraduate education, but one which needs to transform toward;

a synthesising mind, operating from an informed, grounded basis;

a creative mind, to go beyond synthesis to create something new;

a respectful mind, able to work with others and approach one’s employer without an undue sense of entitlement; and

an ethical mind: socially conscious, professional, taking responsibility and being true to core values. This mapped to what one panelist felt was the most valuable and rare skill in graduates in his experience: ‘cop-on.’.

To this basic list, a further trait was added – the ‘metacognitive’ mind, which observes the state of the mind and places it in to the context of the environment around it.

From this perspective, the ability to learn, to be intellectually curious and to maintain a centred (or ‘eudaimonic’) existence in a workplace which may be marked by change emerged as the most valuable skills an education could impart. None of this pointed toward the sort of discipline specificity and pro-STEM bias reflected in government policy. But perhaps the results do show that there is common cause to be made among all of the disciplines for an increase in dialogue, in collaboration and in developing the translational capacity among and from the disciplines that will translate into enriched real-world applications. There are measures universities can take across all of the disciplines to increase their transferability, because what every discipline does is instill certain habits of mind, certain primary modes of problem solving and critical thought. In a challenging and rapidly changing world, we really cannot afford to lose or underestimate the value of any of these distinctive perspectives, but pathways that highlight the disciplines as bearers of unique competencies rather than unique content will not happen by managing transferable skills into disciplinary education (e.g. by adding ring-fenced transferable skills courses to a disciplinary curriculum), but by freeing the disciplines to do what they already do so well, and encouraging them to become more connected to what lies at their borders. If higher education’s mission is to form students to succeed in life and work, then its institutions need to look very carefully at their definitions of the term ‘success’ and the mechanisms by which students are pointed toward that goal. These same institutions perhaps also need to rethink the modality of that formation, for the goal may not lie within the standard contours of most universities’ strategies or development trajectories. We should take as our warning bell Saavedra and Saavedra’s (2011) study of the institutional level aggregate of student performance on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standard testing instrument for the development of critical thinking skills and for the effectiveness of an undergraduate education. Although private institutions did far better than public, better results did not correlate with common measures of university quality such as selectivity, rankings based on reputation, share of faculty with PhD or share of full-time faculty and expenditures per student. Indeed the only meaningful correlation the authors of this study were able to find was lower staff–student ratios. Our disciplines may form the contours of minds, but it is our mentors that strengthen them. We ignore this lesson at our peril.