文档介绍：EMPLOYABILITY:
DEVELOPING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HIGHER EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT
LEE HARVEY
Opening presentation at the
Fifth Quality in Higher Education 24-Hour Seminar
Scarman House, Warwick University,
28 October, 1999.
/crq
Introduction
There is growing pressure on higher education to develop the relationship between the academy and employment. However, this does not mean that in producing ‘work-ready’ graduates, higher education should change its focus to training.
Since the late 1980’s, there has, in many countries, been increasing pressure on higher education to contribute directly to national economic regeneration and growth (Ball, 1989, 1990). Increasingly, national and international assessments of the role and purposes of education indicate a need for higher education to contribute significantly to ‘meeting the needs of the economy’(DES, 1987; EC, 1991).
A major factor behind this pressure has been the growing concern, within individual economies and within the European Union as a whole, about petitiveness. For example, the Industrial Research and Development mittee (IRDAC, 1990) of the mission argued that the output of education and training systems (including, in particular, higher education) in terms of both quantity and quality of skills at all levels, is the prime determinant of a country’s level of industrial productivity and petitiveness.
This view was, for example, recently endorsed by an Expert Group appointed by the Irish Government: ‘A highly skilled and motivated work force is essential to remaining petitive’(EG, 1998) and by the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) and mittee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (CVCP) in the UK: ‘It is ing generally believed that improved skills training for the UK work force would lead to petitiveness’(CVCP/DfEE/HEQE, 1998a, p. 2). Furthermore, the DfEE estimates that the public rate of return on state investment in higher education is 7–9%, and the private rate of return to gradu