Every few months, the head of the CGHE in the UK, Dr. Simon Marginson writes a really good think piece and publishes it in University World News. I am not exaggerating when I say these essays set the tone in global higher education discussions for several weeks (and when those weeks are up, he publishes another one—it’s genius). And it’s great that he does this: Simon’s genuinely brilliant and one of only a handful of people out there who genuinely have a terrific grasp of global higher education dynamics.

But there’s one teensy, tiny place where I think I want to push back on his narrative, and that has to do with the notion of the notion of employability and whether its role in academia is pernicious or not.

Let me send you to his latest “big think” piece in University World News, adopted from his 2024 Burton Clark lecture, entitled “Higher Education faces a more fragile and contested future.” It’s structured around three questions:

Is Equality of Higher Education Impossible? Here, Marginson riffs on the fact that pretty much everywhere in the world, as massification of higher education continues, so too does institutional stratification. Result: maintained inequality, which undermines much of what was seen as the promise of massified education, which in turn lowers public support for it. Bang on.

Is Higher Education National or Global? As Marginson points out, the answer until fairly recently—say the start of Chairman Xi’s second term in office—would have been both. Since then, “the shared global space crucial to higher education [has been] diminished.” I’m less convinced by some of his language around “increased methodological nationalism” and very much disagree that the research barriers that are going up due to global political divisions have anything at all to do with moves by countries like Canada and Australia reducing student intake. But the general point is that institutions are going to have a harder and harder time over the next few years maintaining global presences and perspectives.

But then there’s the third question (second in the actual article), which I find…problematic. To wit: Is higher education cultural or economic? Let me quote Marginson here in detail:

Studies repeatedly show that students have multiple objectives. They want personal growth and experience, and immersion in disciplinary knowledge, and graduate jobs. It’s not either-or. But the objectives are still distinct. Higher education is more like schooling than like work. Agentic positioning, goals, values, knowledges, skills and required behaviours are different. The best training in skills and employability is in the job.

However, the pure human capital vision, education focused solely on productivity and employability, now dominates policy and public debate in many countries concerned about graduate under-employment. The focus on narrow employability carries moral authority. The right to work is widely felt, as it should be. So governments more confidently press for the remaking of higher education by pushing the sphere of work back into education and measuring education in vocational economic terms, installing extrinsic job preparation inside the intrinsic core of higher education. This is a second trap.

The bottom line is that neo-liberal policy does not see higher education as personal formation in knowledge as optimal for productivity and growth. If government set out today to design a higher education system focused on employable graduates, it would not use cultural formation, knowledge organised in academic disciplines, and the teaching-research nexus. I think it is only a matter of time before a new model of ‘job-ready’ education is proposed that unwinds the cultural core, promising greater efficiency and job security, radically stripping back autonomous self-formation in knowledge, and deconstructing the foundations of university organisation and academic work.

Matters have gone too far. The singular economic framework is rapidly marginalising cultural formation. We need to make the case for cultural formation. This means coming out hard and publicly in support of the role of knowledge and the benefits of student engagement in it. If we don’t advocate knowledge and cultural formation, and the shared empowerment and democratic agency they bring, no one else will.

With all due respect, this all seems really overblown for a few reasons. First, I am pretty sure that I can count the number of governments making a big deal about employability outcomes on one hand. This is not a world-wide phenomenon by any means. In most of the world, they are still building universities at a rate of knots because they are seem to unlock doors of opportunity (there are still problems of employability in places like India, but these are seen as questions of quality assurance rather than something wrong with the structure of higher education).

Second, among those jurisdictions who are making a big deal about it, I am not sure I can name any who are actually taking concrete and effective policy steps to make institutions more employability-focused (do not @ me with Ontario’s performance system: for reasons I explained back here the system that was adopted in no way imposes any serious penalties on institutions for poor performance on that score). There is a lot of rhetoric about this, certainly—and maybe some of the loudest is coming from the two countries Marginson knows best, the UK and Australia. But even in Australia the current government is committed to dismantling the “Job Ready Graduates” system which in theory massively incentivized STEM programs over humanities (but in fact did no such thing because of the way the student aid system is structured to muffle price signals). China is eliminating a relatively small number of programs (relative to the size of the country) with poor graduate outcomes, but given graduate unemployment approaching 20%, that’s not really that serious a measure.

Finally, with respect to the idea that pernicious governments might not today choose to see universities organized in academic disciplines….well, frankly I’m not sure anyone that is not already fairly invested in the current system would organize around academic disciplines. And that isn’t for crass “let’s increase GDP” reasons, it’s for quite practical “help students understand how their degree will eventually lead to a life and a career” reasons. And that’s to say nothing about the reasonably voluminous literature about the way that administering academia along disciplinary lines is potentially much more expensive than the alternatives.

Anyways, all of this is to say: it’s important to push back on the idea that employability—particularly short-term job transitions—are the be-all and all of higher education policy. But massification of higher education does actually kind of depend on the promise that universities do lead to jobs, and it does not behoove universities to pretend this isn’t important or that they shouldn’t be giving it due weight. And we shouldn’t confuse government rhetoric for policy reality. There’s still a significant gap between the two.