The Quiet Race: What Are We Moving Students Towards?

Something has been bothering me at university open days.

Prospective students increasingly ask what job a degree will lead to. What sort of career can I have? What do graduates go on to do? Will this degree make me employable?

They are perfectly reasonable questions. A degree is expensive, the labour market is uncertain and students have every right to think about how they are going to earn a living.

I don't blame them for asking.

What bothers me is that we seem to have constructed an education system in which these have become the obvious questions to ask.

Universities themselves have helped create this. We have become comfortable talking about higher education through employability, graduate outcomes, skills, progression, student satisfaction and value for money. None of these things is inherently objectionable. Universities need to be accountable and students should expect their education to create opportunities.

My concern is what happens when one purpose of education gradually becomes the purpose.

What exactly is the outcome?

Bill Readings was worrying about something related to this thirty years ago in The University in Ruins (1996). He wrote about the rise of “excellence” as an organising idea within universities. It is a wonderfully useful institutional word because almost anything can be excellent.

The awkward question is: excellent at what?

We now measure universities remarkably well. Continuation, completion, attainment, student experience and graduate progression can all be quantified and compared. In England, the Office for Students explicitly includes progression into professional or managerial employment, further study and other positive destinations within its measures of student outcomes.

There are good reasons for collecting those data.

Yet something changes when the things we can measure begin to define what we value.

Intellectual independence is particularly troublesome because it doesn't fit very comfortably into a spreadsheet.

I have found myself thinking about this through an analogy which initially made me uncomfortable.

Perhaps it should.

Temple Grandin and the curved race

Temple Grandin's work on livestock handling paid careful attention to how cattle perceive their surroundings. Curved races, solid sides and the removal of visual distractions can make animals easier to move while reducing unnecessary fear and agitation.

The intention was humane. Grandin was trying to make an existing process less stressful for the animals passing through it.

It is the architecture of that process that interests me.

The animal moves through a carefully designed environment. What it sees immediately ahead encourages continued movement. Unnecessary obstacles are removed. The system works precisely because it has been designed to make progression easier.

And I increasingly find it difficult not to see an uncomfortable parallel with education.

School.

GCSEs.

Sixth form or college.

University.

Degree classification.

Graduate employment.

At every stage we have become better at managing the transitions. We monitor progression, identify barriers, measure outcomes and record destinations.

Again, much of that is good.

But where, in this increasingly well-designed route, do we encourage somebody to stop and ask where they are actually going?

That is the limit and the point of my analogy. Students are obviously not cattle and education is not an abattoir. The similarity I am interested in is narrower: a system can become extremely good at moving its participants towards a destination without requiring them to question who chose the destination in the first place.

Being the subject of your own education

Gert Biesta provides a much better vocabulary for this than the language of employability versus education.

He describes three functions of education: qualification, socialisation and subjectification.

Qualification is relatively straightforward. Education provides knowledge, skills and capabilities that enable us to do things.

Universities should do that.

Subjectification is harder. It concerns the possibility of a person existing as the subject of their own life rather than simply as the object of other people's intentions and interventions (Biesta, 2020).

That distinction bothers me because it captures something I fear we are losing.

If we conceive of the student primarily as somebody being prepared for employment, it becomes remarkably easy for other people to decide what that person needs to become.

Employers require particular skills. Universities teach those skills. Students demonstrate them. Graduate outcome measures tell us whether the process worked.

Everyone involved can be acting with perfectly good intentions.

And yet the student can still become the object of the process.

I want our graduates to be harder to fool

I work in psychology, so perhaps my view of this is inevitably shaped by my discipline.

I want psychology graduates to understand experimental design, statistics and research methods. I want them to analyse data properly and understand the limitations of the methods they use. These are useful skills. Employers quite reasonably value them.

But I would be disappointed if that was all we had achieved after three years.

A psychology graduate should be harder to fool.

When somebody makes a confident claim, I want them to wonder how we know it.

When somebody presents a graph, I want them to look at the axes.

When they hear the phrase “research shows”, I want their next thought to be: which research?

When everybody in the room agrees, I hope they retain at least the capacity to wonder whether everybody in the room might be wrong.

And, equally importantly, when the evidence contradicts something they themselves believe, they should be capable of changing their mind.

Ronald Barnett (1997) described something broader than conventional critical thinking as critical being: bringing critical scrutiny not only to knowledge but to oneself and to the world.

That seems to me a much more ambitious educational outcome.

It might make somebody a very good employee.

It might occasionally make them an awkward one.

I don't regard that as an educational failure.

Education as a private investment

There is another part of this which universities cannot conveniently place entirely at the feet of governments or employers.

We have sold higher education partly in these terms ourselves.

David Labaree (1997) distinguished between competing purposes of education, including democratic equality, social efficiency and social mobility. His analysis concerned American education, but the tension travels rather well.

Education can serve public purposes. It can also become a private commodity through which individuals acquire credentials and improve their competitive position.

The language surrounding university increasingly makes the latter interpretation very easy.

Invest in yourself.

Acquire skills.

Increase your employability.

Build your career.

Get the credential.

Seen through that lens, the prospective student asking “What job will this degree get me?” has understood the system perfectly.

Perhaps it is the university that needs to reconsider its answer.

Then AI arrived

AI makes all of this considerably more interesting.

Universities are currently trying to work out which skills graduates will require in an AI-rich labour market. Courses are changing, assessment is changing and considerable effort is going into preparing students for occupations that themselves may change substantially.

There is something slightly strange about this.

At precisely the point when machines are becoming increasingly capable of performing many instrumental knowledge tasks, we risk defining university education ever more strongly around the acquisition of instrumental knowledge skills.

I don't know which software package a psychology graduate will need in 2040.

I don't know which parts of their future job will have been automated.

I don't know whether some of the jobs we currently prepare students for will exist in recognisable form.

Neither, I suspect, does anybody else.

I am rather more confident that they will need judgement.

They will need to recognise weak evidence, tolerate uncertainty, distinguish confidence from competence, notice when an argument doesn't follow and decide when a machine — or another human being — is wrong.

Most of all, they will occasionally need to decide what they themselves think.

Leaving the race

None of this means that universities should stop caring whether graduates find employment.

For most students, employment matters enormously. Nor do I want to retreat into an imaginary golden age in which universities were populated entirely by people pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Such an institution never existed for most of the population.

My concern is about balance.

There should still be room in a degree to become fascinated by something with no obvious commercial application.

There should be room to read something you profoundly disagree with.

There should be room to construct an argument and discover that it doesn't work.

There should be room to change your mind.

There should even be room to become intellectually inconvenient.

That brings me back to Grandin's curved race.

The interesting thing about the system is its efficiency. Movement becomes easier because the environment has been designed to facilitate it.

Perhaps universities should be slightly less frightened of intellectual friction.

A student who enters university, progresses efficiently through a programme, acquires the required competencies and enters graduate employment can quite legitimately be recorded as a successful outcome.

But I am no longer convinced that this, by itself, describes an education.

Something else should have happened.

Somewhere along the route, the person travelling through the system should have developed the intellectual independence to look at the direction of travel and ask:

Why am I going this way?

And, if necessary, to leave the race.

References

Barnett, R. (1997). Higher Education: A Critical Business. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.

Biesta, G. (2020). Risking ourselves in education: Qualification, socialization, and subjectification revisited. Educational Theory, 70(1), 89–104. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12411

Grandin, T. (1989). Behavioral principles of livestock handling. The Professional Animal Scientist, 5(2), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.15232/S1080-7446(15)32304-4

Labaree, D. F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34(1), 39–81. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312034001039

Readings, B. (1996). The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.