Ich liebe dich trotzdem. Prekarität in der Kultur- und Wissensproduktion
Fr, 24.4., 20h - Goldener Salon, Große Bergstraße
Wo fängt unbezahlte Arbeit an? Wo hört sie auf? Ist unser Leben ein einziges Projekt? Was ist das Versprechen der Selbstständigkeit? Erste Antworten geben die Carrot Workers (London), das Projekt “the University and Precarity” (Berlin) und die Kampagne “Mir reicht´s … nicht!” (Hamburg)
in the context of hamburg euromayday (http://www.euromayday.tk/), i gave a short presentation of the university and precarity project. there was also a presentation of the carrot workers project (http://carrotworkers.wordpress.com/) and the “mir reichts…nicht” campaign (http://mirreichts-nicht.org/)
competition and the university
How many of your friends have you competed for work with in the past year?
The University and Precarity is a project that is trying to map out some of the different ways that the university is complicit in, and productive of, precarious conditions in living and working life, especially with reference to postgraduates. One of the points where precarisation can be identified is in the different forms of competition associated with postgraduate life and working life more generally. In this context its useful to look at how competition plays out in terms of subjective desires and expectations, through personal and social relations, and how this translates into capitalist modes of production and concrete job markets. To start with the example of the university one can see how competition comes to act as a device for producing the precarisation of subjects on a number of levels that extends to employment outside university:
Unpaid work (competition pitches people against each other in terms of rating ones own personal success)
- Postgraduate students willingly participate in massive amounts of unpaid work with the hope that this will lead to better chances of peer recognition and hence employment
- Also seeing knowledge as exclusive property and as a means to move ahead professionally. Interpersonal consequences: students very judgemental of one another’s ideas (increasing your own self worth by devaluing someone else), take on cynical critical persona as a way to survive the competitive rat race, discouraged from collaboration, less tendency to share ideas and work, the production of individuation and alienation, hierarchies of specialisation/exclusion based on how you speak, how well you articulate yourself, how well you valorise yourself, how well you connect to current trends etc
Paid self-exploitation (competition prevents formation of collective consciousness)
- Tutoring positions (necessary for work experience so that later you might get a tenured job): limited number available so people willing to work for less pay at casualised rates, will sign contracts that are unrealistic and do unpaid overtime
- Because these positions are so highly sought after there is less solidarity amongst workers, example of University of Melbourne campaign and nonstandardised pay rates and the lack of solidarity between the departments based on fear that that would diminish their pay conditions
Post university work/ outside of the university job market (competition to set yourself apart from all others who have gone through same degree system)
- This competitive environment extends well beyond the university sector. Supply of graduates often exceeds demand within the university as there are less and less jobs, and the jobs which you are qualified for outside of the academic institution are also limited. People vying for work which they are not specifically qualified for, needing to sell themselves then as more flexible and having transferable skills, competing with others that have the same qualification.
- Differential inclusion: what university you went to, who you studied with, who you know, how you are branded by what you are associated with, this is the criteria on which your potential use value is assessed
- Excess of graduates also pushes up the entry level in the job market, producing new systems and standards for application aside from simply having a degree (i.e. what “life experience” you have had, what else can you bring to the job or to the company, what other qualifications do you have etc)
- Increased pressure to get an edge somehow, how to make yourself unique, necessary social skills required, reproduces competitive environment as you are constantly seeking to make yourself stand out by proving how you are different from everyone else with the same degree as you
Social networking (competition to accumulate most amount of social contacts/ merits/ opportunities)
- Often comes down to who you know, how you “play the game”
- Collaborations/ collective work often done on this basis of what can I get out of this for my career, considering social relations as springboard for work connection
What are some possible and preliminary ways to negotiate around this?
- work outside of university institutions: form collectives and do independent research/ activities/ produce different forms of knowledge get funding outside of universities
- autonomous education initiatives and free universities
- community based skillshares: re-evaluate what constitutes a skill set, how we share and exchange knowledge, how we can work cooperatively together
Competition works as a mechanism of governance: how we govern ourselves and how we are governed in terms of what employment we desire, what we can do to attain those desires and at what cost. So its important for us to think about and ask questions like: what do I compete for, who do I compete against, is it a personal drive/ a social drive/ ego fulfilment, what effects does it have on my personal relationships, how does it make me feel about myself? All these questions need to be looked at when we try to think of ways to negotiate around this because we have to see this in larger processes of capitalist individuation.
GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”
Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.
The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.
The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.
In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.
The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review. While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own departments.
If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps:
1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.
Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.
It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.
2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.
Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.
A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.
3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.
4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.
5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.
6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.
For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.
Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Field Notes From Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living.”
20 Australian institutes face immigration department’s probe
7 Apr 2009
MELBOURNE: In a move which could be a major blow to Australia’s overseas education industry, including Indian students’ enrolment, over 20 study centres in the country have been facing probe for their alleged involvement in breaches of immigration law.
“The department is assessing allegations concerning 20 education providers that are operating out of Melbourne. Some of those investigations have been ongoing since early 2008. The department is not in a position to provide further information at this time as it might jeopardise the progress of those investigations,” said spokesperson of the Immigration Department.
The Department, as quoted by ‘The Age’ daily today, said the probes against the allegations were launched early last year and also involved other government agencies. Such a move can hit the 3.9 billion Australian dollars overseas education industry, including the Indian student enrolments, that were currently rising in number. The daily said that the issue surfaced within weeks of a raid on migration agents allegedly supplying fake documents to international students.
Last year, immigration authorities and police raided nine Melbourne institutions, including a private training college, on the complaints that some agents were charging upto 20,000 dollars for fake education certificates and work references. Indians studying in Australia have been growing fast with 96,739 Indian enrolments in Australian higher education and vocational training courses last year, a massive 54 per cent increase on the almost 63,000 enrolments in 2007 and up from just 11,313 in 2002.
With India projected to be the fifth-largest consumer market by 2025, Australian-trained Indian graduates and skilled workers represent a future trade and investment bonanza as they return home with jobs in the business and government sector. Indian students now make up almost 18 per cent of Australia’s total foreign student population, the second largest group after China, which represents 23.5 per cent of the total foreign student body. Foreign students are now Australia’s third-largest export income earner, behind coal and iron ore, contributing USD 14.1 billion in direct income and an additional USD 12.6 billion in value-added goods and services, a new Access Economic report has found.
The daily reported that Victorian regulator of education and training providers, Victorian Registration and Qualification Authority, was aware unscrupulous operators, particularly among private training colleges, but denied they were widespread.
qualified non-eu immigrants to be denied uk graduate jobs
03-Mar-2009
Qualified Non-EU Immigrants To Be Denied UK Graduate Jobs Overseas students from outside the EU will be excluded from taking up the best graduate jobs in the UK under new rules announced by the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith.
Although the new rules will not apply to those students from inside the European Union, it is thought that the number of eastern Europeans coming to Britain to find work will also start to decline.
The new regulation will come into effect this April and will affect thousands of students who were hoping to find graduate jobs in England. It will be stipulated that, for professionals outside of the European Union, a bachelor’s degree will no longer be enough to afford entry to the United Kingdom. Students will now have to hold at least a master’s degree, along with an offer of a job paying at least £20 thousand a year, in order to be considered for a visa.
It is estimated that the measures will almost halve the numbers entering the UK (in the so called tier one category of highly skilled people) to around 14,000 non-EU migrants.
Jacqui Smith has said that the bar is being raised with regards to what is expected of people entering Britain to find work. In an interview with Andrew Marr at the weekend, she said that the system would make sure that only the candidates most qualified to fill positions would be certain to get them. She added that it made economic sense to be ‘more selective about those who come into the country.’
The measures are already being labelled as ‘British Jobs for British Graduates’ in mocking reference to Gordon Brown’s statement about ‘British jobs for British workers’ last year. The statement caused uproar at the time as such slogans had been used by the National Front and BNP.
The Home Secretary has denied that the measures are a knee-jerk, protectionist mechanism in reaction to recent protests over jobs going to foreign workers. She attempted to give balance to the regulations by saying that the government, “recognise that migration continues to play an important role in the UK, at the same time we are giving greater support to domestic workers so that we can all come through the recession stronger.”
If you are looking for the best graduate jobs in the UK then please feel free to make use of our graduate job search page - the vacancies are still open to graduates from all around the world, as the new regulation won’t come into force until April.
AN ACADEMIC IN AMERICA
Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go
It’s hard to tell young people that universities view their idealism and energy as an exploitable resource
By THOMAS H. BENTON
Nearly six years ago, I wrote a column called “So You Want to Go to Grad School?” (The Chronicle, June 6, 2003). My purpose was to warn undergraduates away from pursuing Ph.D.’s in the humanities by telling them what I had learned about the academic labor system from personal observation and experience.
It was a message many prospective graduate students were not getting from their professors, who were generally too eager to clone themselves. Having heard rumors about unemployed Ph.D.’s, some undergraduates would ask about job prospects in academe, only to be told, “There are always jobs for good people.” If the students happened to notice the increasing numbers of well-published, highly credentialed adjuncts teaching part time with no benefits, they would be told, “Don’t worry, massive retirements are coming soon, and then there will be plenty of positions available.” The encouragement they received from mostly well-meaning but ill-informed professors was bolstered by the message in our culture that education always leads to opportunity.
All these years later, I still get letters from undergraduates who stumble onto that column. They tell me about their interests and accomplishments and ask whether they should go to graduate school, somehow expecting me to encourage them. I usually write back, explaining that in this era of grade inflation (and recommendation inflation), there’s an almost unlimited supply of students with perfect grades and glowing letters. Of course, some doctoral program may admit them with full financing, but that doesn’t mean they are going to find work as professors when it’s all over. The reality is that less than half of all doctorate holders — after nearly a decade of preparation, on average — will ever find tenure-track positions.
The follow-up letters I receive from those prospective Ph.D.’s are often quite angry and incoherent; they’ve been praised their whole lives, and no one has ever told them that they may not become what they want to be, that higher education is a business that does not necessarily have their best interests at heart. Sometimes they accuse me of being threatened by their obvious talent. I assume they go on to find someone who will tell them what they want to hear: “Yes, my child, you are the one we’ve been waiting for all our lives.” It can be painful, but it is better that undergraduates considering graduate school in the humanities should know the truth now, instead of when they are 30 and unemployed, or worse, working as adjuncts at less than the minimum wage under the misguided belief that more teaching experience and more glowing recommendations will somehow open the door to a real position.
Most undergraduates don’t realize that there is a shrinking percentage of positions in the humanities that offer job security, benefits, and a livable salary (though it is generally much lower than salaries in other fields requiring as many years of training). They don’t know that you probably will have to accept living almost anywhere, and that you must also go through a six-year probationary period at the end of which you may be fired for any number of reasons and find yourself exiled from the profession. They seem to think becoming a humanities professor is a reliable prospect — a more responsible and secure choice than, say, attempting to make it as a freelance writer, or an actor, or a professional athlete — and, as a result, they don’t make any fallback plans until it is too late.
I have found that most prospective graduate students have given little thought to what will happen to them after they complete their doctorates. They assume that everyone finds a decent position somewhere, even if it’s “only” at a community college (expressed with a shudder). Besides, the completion of graduate school seems impossibly far away, so their concerns are mostly focused on the present. Their motives are usually some combination of the following:
* They are excited by some subject and believe they have a deep, sustainable interest in it. (But ask follow-up questions and you find that it is only deep in relation to their undergraduate peers — not in relation to the kind of serious dedication you need in graduate programs.)
* They received high grades and a lot of praise from their professors, and they are not finding similar encouragement outside of an academic environment. They want to return to a context in which they feel validated.
* They are emerging from 16 years of institutional living: a clear, step-by-step process of advancement toward a goal, with measured outcomes, constant reinforcement and support, and clearly defined hierarchies. The world outside school seems so unstructured, ambiguous, difficult to navigate, and frightening.
* With the prospect of an unappealing, entry-level job on the horizon, life in college becomes increasingly idealized. They think graduate school will continue that romantic experience and enable them to stay in college forever as teacher-scholars.
* They can’t find a position anywhere that uses the skills on which they most prided themselves in college. They are forced to learn about new things that don’t interest them nearly as much. No one is impressed by their knowledge of Jane Austen. There are no mentors to guide and protect them, and they turn to former teachers for help.
* They think that graduate school is a good place to hide from the recession. They’ll spend a few years studying literature, preferably on a fellowship, and then, if academe doesn’t seem appealing or open to them, they will simply look for a job when the market has improved. And, you know, all those baby boomers have to retire someday, and when that happens, there will be jobs available in academe.
I know I experienced all of those motivations when I was in my early 20s. The year after I graduated from college (1990) was a recession, and the best job I could find was selling memberships in a health club, part time, in a shopping mall in Philadelphia. A graduate fellowship was an escape that landed me in another city — Miami — with at least enough money to get by. I was aware that my motives for going to graduate school came from the anxieties of transitioning out of college and my difficulty finding appealing work, but I could justify it in practical terms for the last reason I mentioned: I thought I could just leave academe if something better presented itself. I mean, someone with a doctorate must be regarded as something special, right?
Unfortunately, during the three years that I searched for positions outside of academe, I found that humanities Ph.D.’s, without relevant experience or technical skills, generally compete at a moderate disadvantage against undergraduates, and at a serious disadvantage against people with professional degrees. If you take that path, you will be starting at the bottom in your 30s, a decade behind your age cohort, with no savings (and probably a lot of debt).
What almost no prospective graduate students can understand is the extent to which doctoral education in the humanities socializes idealistic, naïve, and psychologically vulnerable people into a profession with a very clear set of values. It teaches them that life outside of academe means failure, which explains the large numbers of graduates who labor for decades as adjuncts, just so they can stay on the periphery of academe. (That’s another topic I’ve written about before; see “Is Graduate School a Cult?” (The Chronicle, July 2, 2004.)
I fell for the line about faculty retirements that went around back in the early 90s, thanks to the infamous Bowen and Sosa Report. I still hear that claim today, from people who ought to know better. Even if the long-awaited wave of retirements finally arrives, many of those tenure lines will not be retained, particularly not now, in the context of yet another recession.
Just to be clear: There is work for humanities doctorates (though perhaps not as many as are currently being produced), but there are fewer and fewer real jobs because of conscious policy decisions by colleges and universities. As a result, the handful of real jobs that remain are being pursued by thousands of qualified people — so many that the minority of candidates who get tenure-track positions might as well be considered the winners of a lottery.
Universities (even those with enormous endowments) have historically taken advantage of recessions to bring austerity to teaching. There will be hiring freezes and early retirements. Rather than replacements, more adjuncts will be hired, and more graduate students will be recruited, eventually flooding the market with even more fully qualified teacher-scholars who will work for almost nothing. When the recession ends, the hiring freezes will become permanent, since departments will have demonstrated that they can function with fewer tenured faculty members.
Nearly every humanities field was already desperately competitive, with hundreds of applications from qualified candidates for every tenure-track position. Now the situation is becoming even worse. For example, the American Historical Association’s job listings are down 15 percent and the Modern Language’s listings are down 21 percent, the steepest annual decline ever recorded. Apparently, many already-launched candidate searches are being called off; some responsible observers expect that hiring may be down 40 percent this year.
What is 40 percent worse than desperate?
The majority of job seekers who emerge empty-handed this year will return next year, and for several years after that, and so the competition will snowball, with more and more people chasing fewer and fewer full-time positions.
Meanwhile, more and more students are flattered to find themselves admitted to graduate programs; many are taking on considerable debt to do so. According to the Humanities Indicators Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, about 23 percent of humanities students end up owing more than $30,000, and more than 14 percent owe more than $50,000.
As things stand, I can only identify a few circumstances under which one might reasonably consider going to graduate school in the humanities:
* You are independently wealthy, and you have no need to earn a living for yourself or provide for anyone else.
* You come from that small class of well-connected people in academe who will be able to find a place for you somewhere.
* You can rely on a partner to provide all of the income and benefits needed by your household.
* You are earning a credential for a position that you already hold — such as a high-school teacher — and your employer is paying for it.
Those are the only people who can safely undertake doctoral education in the humanities. Everyone else who does so is taking an enormous personal risk, the full consequences of which they cannot assess because they do not understand how the academic-labor system works and will not listen to people who try to tell them.
It’s hard to tell young people that universities recognize that their idealism and energy — and lack of information — are an exploitable resource. For universities, the impact of graduate programs on the lives of those students is an acceptable externality, like dumping toxins into a river. If you cannot find a tenure-track position, your university will no longer court you; it will pretend you do not exist and will act as if your unemployability is entirely your fault. It will make you feel ashamed, and you will probably just disappear, convinced it’s right rather than that the game was rigged from the beginning.
Thomas H. Benton is the pen name of William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Mich. He writes about academic culture and welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com. For an archive of his previous columns, see http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/archives/columns/an_ academic_in_america.
China’s surge of college graduates finds white-collar work elusive. Some 6.1 million grads are expected to flood the job market this year – joining the 27 percent of last year’s diploma-holders who still haven’t found work. Instead, they’re finding deserted job fairs, hiring freezes, and salaries that migrant workers might expect. Confronted by global recession and a heavily blue-collar economy, China’s educated elite are having to lower their expectations – frustrating families and putting the government on alert ahead of the 20th anniversary of the student-led Tiananmen protests.
There’s “a mismatch between expectations and realities, exacerbated by the current economic slowdown,” says Thomas Rawski, a China expert at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. “It really is a clash of preferences.” The oversupply of students first ballooned in 1999, when China erected a flurry of colleges in an effort to mint more of the scientists and managers it needed for a 21st-century economy. It also sought to absorb a burst of teenagers born in a post-Cultural Revolution baby boom after 1976.
Enrollment rose quickly, from 3 percent of college-age students in the 1980s to 20 percent today. Despite the rapid expansion, only 6 percent of the population now holds college degrees. Not surprisingly, graduates expect elite jobs, as do the relatives who footed their tuition bill. Topping the A-list are government jobs, which pay modestly but offer benefits and security. Last year, some 750,000 students took the civil service exam – and only 2 percent could expect slots. Big companies draw students, too: Though less stable than the civil service, business jobs pay well and provide better training.
AUSTRALIA: Graduates prepare for job shortages
Geoff Maslen
01 March 2009
As the economic downturn begins increasingly to affect Australian industry and business, university graduates are preparing for a far more difficult time finding jobs than any generation in more than 20 years. Surveys by Graduate Careers Australia show that as employment opportunities decline, many graduates opt to continue their full-time studies. Their idea seems to be to improve their qualifications so they might stand out from the increasing number of bachelor degree-holders leaving the higher education system.
In a survey released last month, the GCA says that some graduates find themselves in areas of employment they might not have previously considered and these might be stop-gap jobs until the labour market improves. “In the interim, these graduates are earning and developing important work-related skills,” the GCA says. At the same time, some graduates take longer to find appropriate work than they might have in previous years - although Australian Bureau of Statistics data show that graduates aged 15 to 64 in the workforce have an unemployment rate half that of non-graduates.
Graduate salaries, however, relative to average earnings in the community tend to fall as graduates take non-graduate level work and thus earn lower salaries. In a survey of graduate employers late last year on the likely impact of the financial downturn on their hiring prospects, almost three in five said it would have some impact. Although nearly three-quarters of employers said they would definitely not cancel taking on new graduates, 9% said they would definitely cut the number and almost 70% said they would consider reducing their 2010 intake of 2009 graduates.
GCA Executive Director Cindy Tilbrook said that despite the economic downturn, it was still important for graduate recruiters to consider the longer term and not just the short-term when reviewing their graduate programmes. “Some of the underlying factors that have driven the recent boom in graduate recruitment in Australia are still relevant, such as the overall ageing of the workforce, and graduate recruiters can use the current situation to place themselves in a preferential position in the eyes of graduates through a commitment to their graduate programmes in these difficult times,” Tilbrook said. She said a continued intake of graduates would also ensure these recruiters were well-placed to maximise opportunities as soon as the economic climate started to turn.
The GCA also surveyed current university students to discover whether students’ career expectations were in line with those of graduate employers. The top selection criteria used for recruiting graduates were interpersonal and communication skills, passion, a knowledge of the industry, drive and commitment, and critical reasoning and analytical skills, problem solving ability, lateral thinking and technical skills. Asked to rank their 2008 graduate applicants on a variety of characteristics, the top three listed by employers were academic results, communication skills, and level of extra-curricular activities. Recruiters rated applicants lowest on their knowledge of the recruiter’s organisation and their demonstrated work experience.
Employers of graduates often expressed a desire for “well-rounded applicants who had a range of core job-ready employability skills, as well as those with outstanding academic achievements. Of their own core employability skills, more than three-quarters of students rated their learning and teamwork skills as being “fairly strong” or “very strong” with around three-quarters rating their communication and problem solving skills relatively highly.”
Graduate Careers Australia Grad stats
http://www.graduatecareers.com.au/content/view/full/24
University of Melbourne Graduate Destination Survey (GDS)
http://www.upo.unimelb.edu.au/Public/Qual_Eval/EC_GDS.html
Written by EMEKA EZEKIEL
Tuesday, 09 December 2008
Lack of requisite skills to meet the job requirements of employers have been identified as one of the major reasons responsible for the high rate graduate unemployment in Nigeria. “Tim Akano, chief executive officer of New Horizon Training Institute, told BusinessDay in an interview in Lagos that the high rate of unemployment in Nigeria was not as a result of unavailability of jobs but dearth of skilled manpower to fill existing job opportunities. According to him, one of the major causes of graduate unemployment is not that there is scarcity of jobs but dearth of skilled manpower to fill the existing opportunities in the job market. Currently, over 70 percent of graduates from Nigerian universities and various tertiary institutions have difficulty in getting jobs. In fact seven out of 10 university graduates are unemployed, underemployed or unemployable., We carried out a research which revealed that the problem with Nigeria is not scarcity of jobs but we do not have people who have the skills that employers are looking for. He disclosed that his organisation has employed about 100 people and planning to expand to West African countries, adding that the major challenge was how to find people with the right skill to do the job.
His wordS: “There are lots of employers that want to expand their businesses and need people with the right skills. There are people in this country who are changing jobs almost every four months whereas others have been looking for job since the last five years . The reason for this contrasting situation is because of the type of skills they have. People go into the labour market thinking that their B.Sc or BA is sufficient for them to get a job. This is not enough because the B.Sc or BA only certifies you academically”. He however stated that employers are the look-out for people who are qualified professionally to solve professional and not academic problems, stressing that there was a mismatch between what the tertiary institutions produce and what employers need, hence the skill gap. Akano further noted that the country’s dream of becoming one of the leading economies by the year 2020 would be a mirage unless adequate government takes adequate steps to ensure that relevant agencies embrace information and communication technology. “The value of a country is not measured by the amount of its natural resources but on its productivity which to a large extent depends on how it effectively deploys the available skills and talents. Nigeria ’s quest of becoming one of 20 leading economies by 2020 will be a mirage unless we have the requisite skills in Information and Communication Technology. In order to meet the vision 2020 target, the government must ensure that all its agencies are ICT compliant”, he said.
Abgebrochene Promotionen oder lange Promotionszeiten, keine oder unzureichende Betreuung, hohe Arbeitsbelastungen auf befristeten Teilzeitstellen, Finanzielle Sorgen, umfangreiche unbezahlte Mehrarbeit, die die Möglichkeiten zur Promotion beschneidet, problematische Kommunikationsstrukturen in den Fakultäten, mangelnde Weiterqualikationsmöglichkeiten, unsichere Karriereaussichten, keine Familienplanung….So und ähnlich lauten Beschreibungen der Arbeits- und Qualikationsbedingungen des Akademischen Mittelbaus, der an deutschen Universitäten den größten Teil der Lehre und
Forschung trägt:
Es gibt an deutschen Hochschulen ca. 100.000 Promovierende. Die Zahl der jährlichen Promotionen außerhalb der Medizin wird mit einer Größenordnung von ca. 20.000 angegeben. Es existieren insgesamt schätzungsweise ca. 20.000 Post-Doc-Stellen. Jährlich werden ca. 2000 Habilitationen abgeschlossen. Etwa 90 Prozent des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses muss sich nach Ablauf der befristeten Beschäftigung an der Hochschule bzw. nach Abschluss der Promotion die Frage stellen, wie es beru? ich weiter geht. Vor diesem Hintergrund sollen auf der Tagung folgende Fragen diskutiert werden:
Wie sieht an deutschen Universitäten die bisherige und derzeitige beru? iche Situation der Nachwuchswissenschaftler/-innen aus? Wie erleben sie diese Situation und als wie unsicher bzw. „prekär“ emp? nden sie diese? Welche Verbesserungsvorschläge formulieren sie? An wen richten sie diese? Wie könnten diese durchgesetzt werden? Wie schätzen sie ihre beru? iche Zukunft ein? Wie beurteilen sie die Gewerkschaften und Personalräte, welche Forderungen, Fragen und Kritik haben sie an diese?
Betroffene akademische Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter sollen auf dieser Tagung ebenso zu Wort kommen, wie Vertreter der Universitätsleitungen und wissenschaftliche Experten, Personalräte und Gewerkschafter. Die TU Berlin hat mit zwei empirischen Umfragen 2002 und 2007 unter ihren „wissenschaftlichen Mittelbauern“ versucht, deren beru? iche Situation zu analysieren und sinnvolle strukturelle Veränderungen einzuleiten – hatte die Universität damit bisher Erfolg?
Im Auftrag von ver.di wurde 2008 in einer breit angelegten Online – Befragung an den Universitäten in Oldenburg, Jena und der TU Berlin der „wissenschaftliche Nachwuchs“ um Auskunft, Kritik und Vorschläge gebeten – die Ergebnisse der Studie werden auf der Tagung erstmalig der Öffentlichkeit vorgestellt und können ab Januar 2009 eingesehen werden bei der Tagungsankündigung unter:
www2.tu-berlin.de/zek/koop/kooptag.html
Mit dem Projekt„Campus der Zukunft“ geht ver.di seit zwei Jahren aktiv und „neugierig“ auf die Wissenschaftler/innen und Studierenden zu, will mehr über deren Arbeits- und Lebenssituation, Sorgen und Wünsche erfahren und – zusammen mit den Personalräten und den betroffenen Gruppen selbst – mithelfen, an den Hochschulen für bessere Lern-, Lehr- und Forschungsbedingungen zu sorgen. Ob und wie dies funktionieren kann – auch das soll Thema der Tagung sein: ein offenes Gesprächsangebot, das konkretes und energisches Engagement für die Zukunft der Nachwuchswissenschaftler/innen verspricht.
I am jumping into the discussion a little late, so maybe I am misreading the nuances of the discussion… apologises if my comments sound off.
I just want to make two contributions
Firstly, some thoughts on the notion of the university as factory, or as occupying the similar position in postFordism that the factory occupied in Fordism. If I am correct the argument runs that the factory was both the apex for the accumulation of surplus-value and for proletarian resistance, and the paradigm for the general organisation of society. Even before people might have talked about the social factory it was possible to think of society in generally as being like a factory.
However did not the revolts of the 1960s work to show how this apex only functioned because it rested on a far more complex arrangement of labour? The uprisings in the kitchens, ghettoes, bedrooms, colonies, campuses and asylums – all which generated new and strange languages and patterns of insubordination – worked with the rebellions in the factories, which were often those attempting to flee the factory, to jam the entire arrangement of accumulation.
Thus if we were to carry the metaphor forward to say the university is the factory, this would imply that there is also a much greater mesh or networks of labour, that perhaps appear submerged, which are necessary for the university to function.
This would have an effect on what is considered precarity at the university. If it is simply a question of the rate of academic employment compared to the number of the qualified, then you only have to turn to the unions. In Australia the NTEU is running a campaign trying to establish Training and Development Placements and Secure Employment Placements. I am sure their researcher would have the stats. (See www.unicasual.com.au). It is a scurrilously social democratic campaign which would probably improve the conditions of my life immeasurably.
Precarity ( I am probably preaching to the choir here) could be thought of as a far more complex phenomena: the very condition of life in postFordism. As Bifo argues it is the subjectivity associated with the exploitation of the general intellect.
My imagining of this precarity ‘map’ (is it a map…can we still map? If we have moved into the society of control can it be represented visually?) would be a whole series of connections. Perhaps all the links of labour that are necessary for the university to function (the money from parents back home, the illegal jobs, the emotional support of partners etc) and all that flows out (the direct products, the graduates , the general enrichment of the general intellect, especially how so much of this happens outside of the class room, in the way that being student means immersion in a ‘life-world’ that then creates general human capabilities, desires and tastes that are sources of value for capital, therefore how much of academic work is the labour of creating a condition of being, corporate events, scientific research etc…)
I think this would all necessitate innovative processes of survey and conversation as our tools of research…
This report presents an overview of the industrial relations and employment and working conditions of self-employed workers in the European Union and Norway. It presents basic trends in self-employment, highlights issues concerning the definition of self-employment and offers an overview of the national situations regarding the legal framework. The study also examines social security as a crucial aspect of the regulation of self-employment and a source of differences between employees and self-employed workers. Recent reforms in this area have often focused on increasing protection measures. Finally, the report analyses the presence and regulation of ‘economically dependent work’, as well as the collective representation of self-employed workers.
