links for graduates and unemployment
//Young Graduates also Experience Difficulty in Securing their First Job
Even though the labour market integration of young people with tertiary
education qualifications (ISCED 5 and 6) appears more straightforward than
in the case of those with lower qualifications (Figure A7), qualifications
at this level are not a guarantee against unemployment after graduation.
http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/Eurydice/PubPage?pubid=052EN&fragment=31&page=1
this is an old one but could be useful for comparisons:
//Higher Education & Graduate Employment in Europe
http://www.pjb.co.uk/npl/bp10.htm
//Higher Education and Graduate Employment in Europe: Results of Graduates
Surveys from 12 Countries. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006.
http://www.uni-kassel.de/incher/cheers/news_e.ghk
//Why is unemployment so high among China’s graduates?
www.eui.eu/Personal/Researchers/Agur/Chinagrad.pd
this could be useful for counting population:
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/pyramids.html
//Employment Opportunities for University Graduates in Europe.
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/Home.portal?_nfpb=true&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ548550&searchtype=keyword&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&_pageLabel=RecordDetails&accno=EJ548550&_nfls=false
links and more input
I think you did a good choice on investigate humanities and creative industries and not the scientific one.
Do we think people who choose humanistic degree and doing it in order to achieve a job strictly related? or personal development, personal interestedplays a relevant role in it?
As an itlaian student went to the UK the main difference that I can see is that: in the UK is also that in the UK for being a good students it’’s required to you totake part in many different kind of activities, sports, voluntarism, journal, radio, and the scolastic preparation seems a bit less relevant…sort of accumulate experience of what it is supposed to be the real world but in the artificial contest of teh uNiversity…. But this it is a very personal idea
Could be important define what does it means for us Creative industries as it has been debated quite a lot…
I’m forwarding to you an article in replaying to Nesta related to future of who have studied creative industries.
* Artists & Art Schools: For or against innovation? A reply to NESTA
Angela McRobbie & Kirsten Forkert
The recently published report from NESTA, ‘The Art of Innovation: How
Fine Arts Graduates Contribute to Innovation’, provides an opportunity
to offer a series of reflections on links between the art schools and
the ‘creative economy’; the nature of cultural policy and the role of
consultancy research; the rise of creative labour and its social
consequences.
text http://www.variant.org.uk/34texts/NESTA34.html
pdf http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue34/nesta34.pd
Reading
Dave Hill and Ravi Kumar’s [eds] Global Neoliberalism and Education and Its Consequences Routledge, 2008
This Foreword meanders a little but is fairly interesting, page XV has an interesting segment on UK PM Gordon Brown’s take on education and globalisation; not to mention the delicious irony of him saying (this in mid-2007, just before the crash) “I believe we [the UK] are - as the City [of London, UK financial centre]’s success shows - capable of being one of the greatest success stories in the new global economy.”
Chapter 3 (p30) is on Higher Education… focuses on the US though. It talks about the highly visible presence of the private sector in US universities, the shift in criteria for selection of university chancellors and deans to those that are the best fund raisers (raising funds form the private sector) who frequently come form business backgrounds and have limited academic credentials, the increase in contracted and part-time only employment for university teachers, links with corporations…
Chapter 4 also focuses on higher education
Dave Hill [ed] Contesting Neoliberal Education Routledge 2007
haven’t had time to look at this yet
Others (Focus on World Bank education policy).
- Debates about Educational Policy: World Bank Perspectives and Alternatives (also see www.worldbank.org/education/)
- World Bank Priorities and Strategies in Education. Washington, DC, 1995.
- Samoff, J. “Which priorities and strategies for education?” International Journal of Education and Development, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 249-271, 1996.
- Burnett, N. and Patrinos, H.A. “Response to critiques of priorities and strategies for education: World Bank review”. International Journal of Education and Development, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 273-276, 1996.
- Heyneman, S. “The History and Problems in the Making of Education Policy at the World Bank: 1960 – 2000” in David Baker and Darcy Gustafson (eds.) International Perspectives on Education and Society Oxford: Elsevier Science, (2005); also appears in: International Journal of Education Development 23 2003, pp. 315 – 337
- World Bank. Education Sector Strategy. Washington DC: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank,1999, pp. i-xi.
- Klees, S. “World Bank Education Policy: New Rhetoric, Old Ideology,” International Journal of Educational Development, Vol 22, 2002, 451-474.
- Hudson, A. H. “Re-visioning from the Inside: Getting Under the Skin of the World Bank’s Education Sector Strategy,” International Journal of Educational Development, forthcoming.
- Soudien, C. “Education in the Network Age: Globalization, Development, and the World Bank,” International Journal of Educational Development, Vol 22, 2002, 439-450.
- Ilon, L. “Agent of Global Markets or Agent of the Poor? The World Bank’s Education Sector Strategy Paper,” International Journal of Educational Development, Vol 22, 2002, 474-482.
graduate numbers vs levels of casual work
I would focus the mapping on simple things: comparing levels of causal work and number of graduates (in the faculties with the biggest number of students) in big cities, in europe and united states, any kind of
university (private or public).
One difficulty if we want to map numbers of graduates versus levels of casual work is data. Does anyone know if this is available at city level. It’s probably extremely uneven if it is. I can ask a labor economist who has done work on ‘alternative employment arrangements’ (as they call precarity in the mainstream) and intersectoral mobility. She knows the US data pretty well. Number of graduates would probably be available from university annual reports or perhaps there’s aggregate listings for countries or states.
Somebody would have to fish all this out.
It’s certain though that precarious work won’t fully register in official datasets. We also know that universities themselves are major propagators of unstable positions. So what at first seems a simple idea starts to get complex quickly when the unpacking starts.
A simple and easy to acquire data base: what that means is finding data of which universities are normally so proud, they collect it themselves and make that information public. Our task is then to provide the interpretive framework that shows how this is the emperor’s new clothes. Seems to me that charting the expansion of English-language based programs in non-Anglophone countries, as well as the inroads made by commercial indices dominated by English media (such as SSCI) that are coming to define the meaning of authoritative knowledge in so-called non-Anglophone regions would be an excellent indicator to correlate to the overall production of precarity (and class composition in general), and it should be information that is readily available. And, if it is not available, enquiries about it wouldn’t normally cause any alarm.
The University and Precarity
This proposal was written as a first step in a much larger process. Please feel free to make comments, suggestions, criticisms etc. This would ideally work as a collaborative and collective project, with many sources of input, so all forms of participation are definitely welcome.
Proposal for Mapping Exercise: The University and Precarity
“Dream Large” (University of Melbourne slogan)
The past few decades have witnessed massive structural reforms on an international scale in the higher education and University sectors. These reforms have not necessarily coincided from region to region or nation-state to nation-state, nor have they been linear or confined to a single set of protocols. Common to all, however, have been striking shifts in the relations between the production of knowledge and the capitalist marketplace. This is what might be linked to the idea of the Education Factory; here, the University becomes a highly commercial and managerial enterprise, a hothouse for the production, qualification and dissemination of cognitive labour. Simultaneous to this has been the increased diffusion and expansion of the University into various terrains, from the social, economic, creative and cultural, to the geopolitical.
Because these imperatives of the University have played out in myriad ways across different zones, it is problematic to mark out a paradigm that would somehow claim to encompass them all. It is possible, though, to research and sketch out some of the common organisational models and the effects that these have had on labour and social production. What could be proposed is an exercise of mapping, or cartography, that would illustrate some of the relationships between the University and the production of precarity. At stake in such an exercise or project is the visual tracing out of a few of the complex and often ambivalent processes and developments that have taken place, and are taking place, in the University – as well as their wider implications. It is clear that there are a number of effects that these new University structures and knowledge institutions have been having on the labour market and on social relations. These include (but are not limited to): increasingly uncertain job futures for academics vying for a small pool of positions; increase in administrative, bureaucratic and management functions in academic work; shifts from focus on teaching work to research work; normalisation of unwaged/ low/ or erratically waged labour for cognitive and creative workers; new creative industries serving to expand arts and humanities into new vocations and markets; supply of students, artists and researchers often exceeding job demands; exploitation of postgraduate students trying to “get a foot in the door”; more demands on academics to create “industry linkages” via funding proposals; systems of “differential inclusion” based on valuation of educational institution, kind of knowledge learnt, reputation etc; the evaluation and stratification of immaterial and cognitive labour via merit and points systems such as performance analysis; uncertainty associated with informal job networks; precarity of student life juggling both study and work; etc.
Methods to investigate these effects can include: forms of militant research, short questionnaires sent to students and staff of various knowledge institutions, collation of personal stories, research of statistical data, political theory and analysis, Zoe’s diagram (pentagram) of creative work “love-cash-personal growth-social valorisation/recognition-social and environmental impact”.
Some questions regarding scope: What kind of geographical focus could it have (problems of “global”)? What are problems surrounding making it too specific or too general, how to refine it/ expand it? Would it be only state universities or also include colleges, private universities, vocational institutes etc.? In the University would it just be academic staff or include other staff? What key aspects might be included? Would it be more focused on the creative and humanities sectors and industries or also scientific/medicine/engineering? What kind of language/ vocabulary might be best used? How to analyse material and data collected, how to negotiate general political/economic analysis with empirical work? What kind of aesthetic would be best suited to it? What function would it serve, who and where would it go to?
Some comments so far:
Brett:
We have to be careful of such statements of the industrialisation of the university since they can be read to imply the reaching of an older mode of production into the university. In edufactory we received this criticism of the name many times. It is true that this is a powerful metaphor, coming from Aronowitz’s The Knowledge Factory and other sources. Sometimes the word corporitisation is used, although surely the point, as registered in the following sentence here, is that work patterns in the wider economy have come more to resemble those developed in the university, as well as other sites. In edufactory the metaphor of the factory was used to suggest that, as was once the factory, the university is now a paradigmatic site of struggle between labour and capital. Although this begs the question of the status and location of the factory now.
This sounds close to the work of the countercartographies collective and their disorientation guide of the research triangle. See http://www.countercartographies.org/. At edu-factory we have contact and collaboration with them, so there is a question of how to relate to their experience.
Perhaps more accurately in some contexts the creation of two classes of academic workers – teachers and researchers – with perhaps a transfer of resources/subsidies from one to the other.
Questions of terminology – e.g. the term precarity travels well in the European space but may be less effective as a political concept in other continental contexts.
Yoni:
1) I think it would be interesting to look at the content of study as well. Weber already accepted specialisation as a fact in 1918 (Politics as Vocation) but today we face a problem of de-skilling. That is, it is not even possible to specialise in a discipline ecause there is no canonical literature, no preparation and apprenticeship, and in Australia, a painful lack of post-graduate courses in the humanities. Not to mention the dispersal of humanities subjects under the guise of ‘Theory’ in all faculties. It is simply impossible to get an education in any meaningful sense at an Australian university and Postmodern scholars have no choice but either to stick to being followers of one thinker (Derrida, Deleuze, Aagamben) or rehashing new ‘readings’ of older texts etc….of course this relates to the structure of the entire education system, and perhaps isolating the university, whilst methodologicaly useful , might be theoreticaly and politicaly harmful.
2) The suitablity of the structure of teaching to the imperatives of pedagogy on the one hand and production on the other. That is to say….what is the real nature of seperating courses into lectures and tutorials. Using the assesment methods of essay, examination etc. What are the ethical and proffesional imperatives guiding student and teacher behavior…..have they changed in accordance with the advent of so-called post-fordism???? Are conferences are suitable model for the production of knowledge etc… Roland Barthes already hinted at the neccesity of a research program on a genealogy of the academic world ased on a history of the conference, lecture, tutor, essay etc….as have the folks up on www.notesforthecomingcommunity.blogspot.com in relation to a foucaultian project, saying that the university is the one disciplinary institution foucault did not subject to a major critique….a possible question to start with is ‘what are the conditions for the production of the distinction between productiv/non productive knowledge etc, what are the theological and disciplanary heritages of the academic assesment system (theis, confirmation!, etc…)
Jon:
What an exciting prospectus for a very ambitious project! Bravo!
I wonder if it is best to map out ‘precarity’ or ‘insecurity’ per se? My preference would be to see you/us map out the way bodies and knowledge are linked in a system of capitalist valorization and circulation in general. Needless to say, in a global industry valued at US$40-50 billion/year, some people/institutions are making a lot of money. Have a look at the Humanities Indicator Prototype project for some useful US data bases http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/default.aspx which suggest, as you indicate above, that disciplinary differences are extremely important factors in the process of valorization.
I have a couple of suggestions for concrete indicators of ‘precarity’ that are vitally important but perhaps not so immediately obvious:
1) language and translation. Of course, the very concept of the national university is a means of instituting standardized national language that throws minority languages into precarity. Of the 8,000 extant languages, only some 200 are official state languages, and among those there is a clear heirarchy related to flows of knowledge, good, and bodies. It would be extremely useful to chart flows of knowledge according to their function as raw data or finished product. The introduction of English-language based programs in many universities is a crucial part of the attempt to attract funding and students. In Translation and Globalization, Michael Cronin (with whom I have serious methodological differences) makes some astute remarks about the precarity of minor languages in relation to institutions of translation today; researchers in the field of biocultural diversity have taken this up in a different but related way.
2) “subjugated knowledge”. The term of course comes from Foucault, whom I love in spite of his incurable and methodological eurocentrism. Concretely, this would be an attempt to chart out kinds of knowledge excluded from journals listed in the major commercial indices like the SSCI and A&HCI, which are almost exclusively official organs of scholarly associations and narrowly-defined disciplines. What kinds of economy exist around these marginalized journals and what kind of relation do they have to the major commercial products?