A vocational liberalism

This blog was kindly authored by John Brennan Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Research atThe Open University.

One of my first higher education research projects and books was A Liberal Vocationalism, undertaken with Harold Silver and funded by the CNAA, (Council for National Academic Awards), where I was working at the time. The book was published in 1988. The 1980s were polytechnic years, and the CNAA was the national quality assurance body for the polytechnics. There were strong concerns about achieving good academic standards alongside the vocational emphasis of quite a lot of the polytechnic courses. The first page of the Liberal Vocationalism book had a quotation from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher about the polytechnics:

They have tended to provide training for specific jobs; in modern jargon (which often seems to confuse rather than clarify) the courses are vocationally motivated (Thatcher, 1970:16).

Then on the second page of the book, there is a quotation from John Dewey:

Liberal education becomes a name for the sort of education that every member of the community should have: the education that will liberate his/her capabilities and thereby contribute both to his/her own happiness and his/her social usefulness. (Dewey, 1914:4-6)

The Liberal Vocationalism project focused on how courses in Business and Engineering should achieve liberal academic aims as well as vocational aims.

However, 40 years later, the focus has turned around. The UK’s Government emphasises ‘skills for jobs’ as the overriding purpose of higher education, and which are regarded as central aims in vocational courses in Business and Engineering, and a lot of other subjects. Meanwhile, the Humanities and Social Sciences are regarded as remaining liberal academic, developing ‘critical thinking’ in the minds of their students. But are these ‘skills for jobs’? Some jobs perhaps? Different skills for different jobs?

The above questions are the kinds of issues that I hope to address in a new project that I am hoping to carry out with Mark Addis, a colleague from the Open University. We have only just submitted an application for funding, so we can’t be sure whether it will happen. But the issues will still be there. What will universities need to change in their humanities and social science courses? But what should they try to protect? We have called the project “The Vocational Liberalism’. Will it be the opposite of ‘The Liberal Vocationalism’ that I did with Harold Silver 40 years ago?

If the project happens, there will need to be a lot of analysis of current policies, institutional aims and procedures involving reviews of existing literature and available websites. But in addition, there will be some institutional case studies, examining what is currently happening and what might happen in the future. We are going to focus on Philosophy and Sociology courses, chosen mainly because my colleague Mark is a Philosopher and I am a Sociologist. And a feature of both subjects is that their graduates go into lots of different jobs, probably requiring lots of different skills. So there can be a difficult question of ‘what are the skills for the job?’. We have already selected two universities where we can investigate both subjects, one being a prestigious long-established university and the other a former polytechnic.  

No research results yet, of course. But one quite interesting discovery regarding Philosophy. My son is in the final year of his Philosophy degree at what would count as one of the elite universities. And, of course, he has lots of quite difficult decisions to make about what jobs to apply for, whether some postgraduate studies would be helpful, and also balancing short-term and long-term plans.

It’s difficult, but also interesting. I had a look at his university website to see if there was any information there about jobs for Philosophy graduates and methods and routes to getting them. There was quite a lot of academic information about the Philosophy degrees, but hardly anything about the jobs the students would get or the things they would need to do in order to get them. However, just out of interest, I had a look at the website of my local university, a former polytechnic. It was different. There were 6 different sentences addressing issues about future employment for Philosophy graduates.

I often remember the distinction that the American sociologist, Martin Trow, made about the development of ‘elite’, then ‘mass’, then ‘universal’ higher education systems. But I always remember and like his emphasis at the end when he wrote “Don’t think that the elite disappears with the arrival of the mass and the universal”. It certainly doesn’t in the UK.

So, one question for our new project, if it happens. Will graduates from our elite universities actually need ‘skills for jobs’?  How many British prime ministers have had degrees in Political Science?  I have done quite a few projects about graduate employment over the years, and quite a few were international. On one European project, I often remember the final conclusion being that graduate employment destinations reflected ‘what’ the students had studied at university. But for British students, it was different; for them graduate employment destinations reflected ‘where’ they had studied.

Well, as and if the country moves from higher and further education towards tertiary education, maybe things will begin to change? And AI will take over? Universities are different, of course. And most of the British universities have been something else before they became universities. And maybe some of that history remains with them for a long time, maybe forever! The full title of our planned project will be ‘The Vocational Liberal: skills for jobs or critical thinking’. Or both?