verging_on_random

Business and education

October 12, 2007 on 11:11 pm | In Uncategorized |

For as long as I can remember, people have been whining about the poor quality of the local education system. I think it was Harry Messel back in the 1950s who started it all by complaining that his physics undergraduates were functionally illiterate. These days it’s more likely to be employers - or the anonymous ‘business’ - who make regular pronouncements that the education system isn’t producing people with the qualities needed to live an intellectually rewarding life create surplus value for capital.

Yesterday saw the most recent of these regular occurrences.

A new report has recommended making skills like communication and problem-solving a mandatory and assessable part of university degrees.

The Federal Government-commissioned report has found employers are generally happy with the technical skills of graduates, but are concerned about the level of employability skills.

Now as someone who teaches in the field, let me give a bit of free human resource management advice to employers. It’s the kind of thing that we teach in introductory courses for first year undergrads. If you are unhappy with the capabilities of your staff, you should adopt one of the following two courses of action:

1. Amend your recruitment and selection procedures so that you only employ people in future who have the capabilities that you require, or alternatively
2. Introduce training and development programs under which your employees will acquire the desired capabilities.

Not rocket science, is it? So why don’t Australian employers like either of these solutions? Well because they are market-based. And despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, Australian employers hate free markets. When it comes to expecting welfare assistance from the state, business has almost as great a culture of entitlement as the so-called self-funded retirees.

Any employer that called for expressions of interest from the dozens of Australian business schools to deliver courses in ‘communication and problem-solving’ would be knocked over in the rush. As long, of course, as the employer was prepared to pay for it. And there’s the rub - by and large, employers aren’t prepared to pay for the cost of developing their staff. They expect universities to do it for them using our taxes.

The trouble with this approach is that universities have been forced to become market-oriented, and guess who the customers are? That’s right - students. Not employers. Universities live and die by their ability to attract and retain students. Students want to enrol in courses that will get them good jobs. Quite obviously at the moment, these courses don’t include communication and problem-solving, otherwise students would be clamouring to do them.

So if business wants universities to teach different capabilities, the answer is in their own hands. There’s no use issuing reports or making public statements about the shortcomings of higher education. Just insist that you won’t employ anyone in future unless they have an accredited qualification in communication and problem-solving. Then sit back and watch students beating down the doors of business schools demanding that these courses be taught, and watch the university managements leap to accommodate the demand.

But if business doesn’t want to do this, but prefers to make plaintive calls for universities to change their courses, then they can expect things to stay much the same in future as they are now. I know some employers are reluctant to acknowledge the truth, but markets really do work sometimes.

BTW a government-commissioned report to try to impose some top-down changes on higher education … honestly. Hasn’t this mob learnt anything from the failures of the Hawke/Keating Governments?