By Ka Ho Mok
University graduates not only face the increasing risk of unemployment, but are usually disappointed by low starting salaries and a lack of upward social mobility. This article critically reviews how the massification of higher education has created the challenges for graduate employment and education governance in Asia.
Introduction
To maintain and improve their competitive advantage in an increasingly networked global market, governments in Asia have made serious attempts to create additional higher-education opportunities for their citizens to produce a high-quality labour force capable of dealing innovatively and creatively with the challenges of a knowledge-based economy. With a rapid increase in higher-education enrolment, higher education in many parts of the Asia-Pacific region has expanded from select groups of elite institutions to vast and complex systems. This article critically reviews how the massification of higher education has created the challenges for graduate employment and education governance in Asia. Figure 1 (see figure 1 below) clearly shows the steady but rapid expansion of higher education enrolments in Asia since 1999.
Mismatch of Supply and Demand in Graduate Employment
Statistical and empirical evidences clearly indicate increasing access to higher education does not guarantee a promising future for university graduates. Rather, as the supply of highly qualified workers now exceeds the demand of the labour market, graduates are no longer enjoying competitive salary packages (Brown and Lauder, 2011). In a study on the effects of higher-education “massification” on graduate employment and the changing needs of the labour market, the author finds that “graduates in Europe, North America and East Asia have been negatively affected in terms of employment and social mobility by the rapid expansion of higher education”. According to official statistics, approximately 40-50% of college graduates in the US are over-qualified for their jobs; 3 million graduates in South Korea are economically inactive; in 2009, nearly 38% of Japanese graduates were unemployed 8 months after graduation; and one in three young graduates in India are unemployed. (Although it is difficult to obtain accurate data for India, only 38% of graduates are estimated to have found high-quality jobs in 2013; see Vedder, Denhart, and Robe, 2013).
[ms-protect-content id=”3162″]University graduates not only face the increasing risk of unemployment, but are usually disappointed by low starting salaries and a lack of upward social mobility. For instance, China has begun to produce more university graduates than the market needs. Many unemployed university graduates who originally travelled from rural areas to enrol in urban universities have remained in China’s major cities in search of work, creating a new sector of the population: the “urban working poor” (Wen and Ngok, 2011). In addition, these unemployed graduates from rural China are commonly regarded as over-qualified, as their skills and knowledge do not necessarily match the changing needs of the labour market. Due to the “over-supply” of university graduates, their average monthly salary has not substantially increased. Even more importantly, employment opportunities are just as class selective as access to and participation in education, especially as participation increases. Mok, Wen and Dale (2016) interviewed respondents from mainland China and Taiwan, and found that the main challenge to graduate employment arises from the massification of access to academic credentials. In terms of starting salaries, the advantages formerly granted to university graduates have begun to decline, as shown in Table 1 (see table 1 below). The gap in average monthly income between graduates from universities and junior colleges is closing. This slow and sometimes even “flattened” growth explains why some national governments, as previously discussed, have begun to vocationalise higher education.
The respondents’ concerns about their future job prospects and potential for social mobility in greater China clearly supported Brown and Scase’s (2005, p. 21) judicious observation that “a degree becomes the key that unlocks (but does not necessarily open) doors”. Therefore, understanding the nature, forms and consequences of the widespread valorisation of academic credentials is vital to any investigation of the conditions for the attainment of greater social justice, particularly through education.
Students’ Discontent: Heavy Investment with Low Returns
From 2011 to 2013, the average income of graduates in mainland China increased by 668 CNY; the equivalent figures for Taiwan and Hong Kong were 100 CNY and 932 CNY, respectively. The uncertain employment prospects of graduates both in Asia and worldwide have attracted growing interest from both scholars and policy makers (Jonbekova, 2015; Mok and Jiang, 2015). The publication Decision to Promote Vocational Education issued in 2014 by the State Council of China, along with a 2012 report entitled Investing in America’s Future: A Blueprint for Transforming Career and Technical Education (A Blueprint) by the United States Department of Education and the Office of Vocational and Adult Education in 2012, reflect growing awareness worldwide of the need for vocational training and professional-skills development.
A Blueprint emphasises employability over “specialised knowledge that is specific to particular careers”, particularly “the ability to work collaboratively in diverse teams, communicate effectively, think critically, solve problems, find and analyse information, ask challenging questions and adapt to change”. These skills make graduates “more employable across specialty areas”, enabling them to move seamlessly “from one job or field to another for a lifetime of career success” (p. 7). As the labour market changes gradually as a result of globalisation, strategies for cultivating globally competitive university graduates have become a major concern of leaders of higher-education institutions. In a survey of 320 chief executive officers (CEOs) conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 2013, 74% of the respondents described liberal-arts education as the best way for young people to prepare for success in the current global economy. Additionally, 95% of employers prioritised (57% strongly prioritised) “hiring people with the intellectual and interpersonal skills that will help them contribute to innovation in the workplace” (p. 4). Table 2 (see table 2 below) clearly indicates youth unemployment in selected countries Asia in 2012, though the situations there are not as bad as their European counterparts.
Similarly, in a survey of CEOs at major UK-based corporations, most of the respondents indicated that they preferred to recruit graduates with generic skills rather than those with specialised skills or professional knowledge obtained at degree level; particular emphasis was placed on a positive attitude to work, good communication and other interpersonal skills, an international perspective, the capacity for critical and creative thought, independent-research and problem-solving skills, and the ability to work effectively in teams (Lieven, 2015). These findings are especially interesting given that many universities in the UK have reformed their curricula by introducing vocational elements to prepare students to compete for jobs after graduation.
Challenges for Education Governance
In a highly unequal world, in particular one in which the globalised economy has transformed the global labour markets by having high skilled and well-educated labour force with relatively cheaper wages, contemporary society is facing a crisis in education governance framework. Confronted with education governance frameworks structurally and strategically select particular interests which in turn distribute (more or less unequal) social opportunities and outcomes (and therefore the basic structure), many students from relatively lower socio-economic backgrounds have found the conventional distributive framework to be problematic; as such, a dominant distributive paradigm “defines social justice as the morally proper distribution of social benefits and burdens among society’s members” (Young, 1990, p. 16). The educated youth in highly competitive global cities must compete for urban resources, for example, competition for elite education. Hence, when analysing the relationships between education and social mobility, we cannot rest upon the conventional notion stating that education promotes social equality and social justice because gentrification in most global cities surely raises the issue of class and class inequalities. Our above study offers strong empirical evidence to challenge this conventional wisdom, especially when education has failed to serve such a distributive function.
In conclusion, when examining how university students and graduates perceive employability and spatial or social mobility, the modes of the valorisation of academic credentials, alongside analyses of their production and distribution, and especially the ways that the “graduate labour market” is as skewed in favour of those with greater social capital and positional goods and the initial selection for university are crucially important. We need to reconstruct a new education governance to promote educational equality because the existing education governance frameworks place responsibilities on those who are particularly advantaged by them (societal interests). In order to break from the existing unequally, but stubbornly imposed, social order, we need to create new modes of accountability and spaces for representation (politics) within and beyond the national state to protect those in less advantaged positions or those who are being socially and economically exploited.
This paper is a revised and adapted version from the author’s recent publication, see Mok, K.H. (2016) “Should Higher Education be Vocationalised? The Role of Liberal-Arts Education in Hong Kong”, in Purinton, T. and Skaggs, J. (eds.) Liberal Arts and American Universities Abroad, AUC Press, forthcoming. For details of references adopted in this paper, please make reference to above publication.
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About the Author
Ka Ho Mok is the Vice-President and concurrently Chair Professor of Comparative Policy of Lingnan University. His recent published works have focused on comparative social development and social policy responses in the Greater China region and East Asia. He is also the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Asian Public Policy (London: Routledge) and Asian Education and Development Studies (Emerald) as well as a Book Series Editor for Routledge and Springer.
