Steve Olivier
The employability agenda and beyond: what are universities for?
Olivier, Steve
Authors
Abstract
In this paper, presented as a provocation for university leaders, I intend to stimulate thought and debate. As such, it is not necessarily a paper typical in the groves of Academe, evaluating and referencing contrasting preceding papers. While I draw on established concepts, I also present actual practice in higher education, relating this to political and quasi-economic matters. Ultimately, the paper is designed to provoke university leaders to question conventional wisdom, accepted practice and politico/social direction. It starts rather factually, describing the landscape of employability in higher education, and then introduces some political considerations. Conceptual points on graduate attributes follow, before I delve into matters more contested, such as the purpose of universities, with my thoughts presented in the context of the preceding points on employability. In short, I argue for institutional and sectoral autonomy, holding that slavishly following imposed agendas will ultimately reduce our institutions' contribution to economic wellbeing.
Citation
OLIVIER, S. 2014. The employability agenda and beyond: what are universities for? London: Leadership Foundation for Higher Education. Hosted on Advance HE [online]. Available from: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/employability-agenda-and-beyond-what-are-universities
Working Paper Type | Discussion Paper |
---|---|
Online Publication Date | Jul 31, 2014 |
Publication Date | Jul 31, 2014 |
Deposit Date | Jan 19, 2022 |
Publicly Available Date | Feb 17, 2022 |
Publisher | Leadership Foundation for Higher Education |
Series Title | Leadership Foundation for Higher Education stimulus paper series |
Keywords | Higher education; Graduate employability; Scotland |
Public URL | https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/1575271 |
Publisher URL | https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/employability-agenda-and-beyond-what-are-universities |
Additional Information | This discussion paper has been published with the ISBN 9781906627621 |
Files
OLIVIER 2014 The employability agenda
(548 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0
You might also like
University and leisure: a commentary and my broad thoughts.
(2023)
Journal Article
Failure to report poor care as a breach of moral and professional expectation.
(2019)
Journal Article
Contracting the right to roam.
(2017)
Other
You don't understand us! An inside perspective on adventure climbing.
(2013)
Journal Article
What do young athletes implicitly understand about psychological skills?
(2010)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About OpenAIR@RGU
Administrator e-mail: publications@rgu.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search