While universities are expected to enhance graduate employability, the role of different higher education features in this process has been overlooked due to an overreliance on employment-based measures. This holds even more in the context of European liberal arts education (LAE) and its distinctive features, the implications of which on student employability gains are still unknown. The resurgence of LAE in Europe has been taking place since the late 1990s, especially in the Netherlands, where ten university colleges have been established. Inspired by the American liberal arts model but maintaining its own specificities, Dutch university colleges are defined by several unique features that distinguish them from traditional bachelor’s programmes. Firstly, university colleges are broad, general academic programmes that are not professionally oriented. Furthermore, university colleges are distinguished by their self-tailored, interdisciplinary curricula that allow students to combine courses from a wide range of fields, a student-centred learning environment involving small-scale teaching and extensive student-faculty interactions, as well as selective admission policies. In contrast to this, traditional bachelor’s programmes in the Netherlands are typically more professionally focused and monodisciplinary, with a fixed curriculum structure, large-scale teaching, and non-selective admission. 

Dutch university colleges have been lauded for their commitment to academic excellence, but also criticized for the alleged impracticality of their degrees. While the proponents of LAE stress its ability to provide an optimal response to the demands associated with the contemporary workplace, little is known as to how the distinctive characteristics of LAE programmes relate to enhancing student employability. The current paper addresses this research gap. Its main goal is twofold. Firstly, it seeks to propose an alternative, developmental approach to assessing the contribution of undergraduate programmes to fostering employability. Secondly, it aims to determine how a university college performs in this regard compared to a traditional bachelor’s programme in Law at the same university. It does so by applying the graduate capital model, a well-established employability framework proposed by Michael Tomlinson (2017), and using it to answer the following research question: How does employability develop in university college students during the course of their studiescompared to their peers from a traditional programme?

Adjusting the graduate capital model to fit the study purpose, the paper focuses on six skills that enhance employability: creativity, lifelong learning, career decidedness, self-efficacy, resilience, and personal initiative. The framework adjustment has been guided by four main considerations, focusing on employability constituents which: (a) are malleable and can be developed within higher education, (b) fundamentally stem from the overall learning environment, (c) are expected to reflect the distinctive features of LAE, and (d) can be measured with adequate instruments. To measure employability growth, a cross-sectional pseudo-cohort research design is adopted, comparing first-, second-, and third-year student cohorts. The study employed a DiD approach, looking at the differences in the development students make within a programme.

The results show that attending an LAE undergraduate programme leads to visible progression in a range of career-relevant skills. This is especially the case with regard to creativity and personal initiative, in which second- and third-year LAE students both scored significantly higher than freshmen. As for career decidedness, self-efficacy, and resilience, significant gains were found for second-year LAE cohorts. Lifelong learning scores revealed no significant differences between the three study years. Compared to the traditional programme, the gains in creativity and personal initiative particularly stand out, reflecting the differences between interdisciplinary and monodisciplinary learning, and self-tailored and fixed curriculum structure. This refutes the stereotype that a liberal arts degree does not prepare students for the labour market and points to the relevance of programme-specific features for employability development in higher education.

In line with Hoareau McGrath et al. (2015), employability growth is considered from the perspective of ‘distance travelled’. As an alternative to monitoring a single cohort of students at two timepoints, this study follows Flowers et al. (2001) in using a cross-sectional pseudo-cohort research design, simultaneously looking at multiple cohorts in different years of their study. More precisely, employability development is assessed by comparing first-, second-, and third-year cohorts at a LAE programme and a traditional undergraduate programme in Law at the same university. The major advantage of this approach is that it accounts for differential selection into programmes, as it focuses on the development of skills across year groups within each programme. This basically resembles a Difference-in-Difference (DiD) approach, accounting for unobserved heterogeneity. However, it assumes that the characteristics of the year cohorts do not change over time. Data was collected via an online survey lasting approximately 20 minutes. A total of 558 responses were included in the final sample. 308 respondents were LAE students and 250 were studying Law, respectively accounting for approximately 39% and 23% of the total number of students enrolled in these two programmes. Guilford’s (1967) Alternate Uses Task (AUT) was used to assess creativity. Lifelong learning was assessed using Wielkiewicz and Meuwissen’s (2014) Lifelong Learning Scale (WielkLLS). Career decidedness was measured on a scale developed by Lounsbury et al. (2005). Self-efficacy was assessed via the General Self-Efficacy Scale (Schwarzer & Jerusalem, 1995). The brief resilience scale (BRS) was used to measure the demonstration of resilience. Personal initiative was measured using the situational judgement test (SJT-PI) developed by Bledow and Frese (2009). These six employability constituents were used as the dependent variables of this study. The study programme and study year served as the main independent variables. In order to take into account the possible compositional differences between the cohorts, a number of controls for student background characteristics have also been collected, including age, gender, country, type of secondary education, high school GPA, and work experience. Six OLS regression models were estimated—one for each dependent variable. All analyses were conducted in Stata 17, using the command regress with robust standard errors. To determine whether the scores significantly differ between first-, second-, and third-year cohorts in each of the programmes, an interaction term was included between the study year and study programme variables. This interaction term was then dissected by using the margins and contrast commands.

The results show that LAE students make significant progress in five out of the six examined employability-related skills. In particular, the comparison between the two programmes points to the relevance of LAE-specific features for the development of creativity and personal initiative. With regard to fostering creativity, the profoundly interdisciplinary character of LAE and the students’ associated ability to approach problems from a plurality of perspectives might have played a crucial role. Likewise, the higher growth in personal initiative can be seen as a consequence of the LAE self-tailored curriculum, which pushes the students to be proactive and take charge of their own educational journey. Hence, it can be inferred that the discrepancy in creativity and personal initiative gains of LAE and Law students reflects the differences between interdisciplinary and monodisciplinary learning, as well as flexible and traditional curriculum structure. Overall, the paper shows that a seemingly impractical liberal arts undergraduate degree provides students with a range of career-relevant skills. This refutes the stereotype that the liberal arts have no economic value. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, it indicates that the dichotomy between ‘learning for learning’s sake’ and ‘learning for career preparation’, often assumed by LAE critics, is false. As Knight and Yorke (2003) pointed out, even without directly aiming to advance graduate employability, a good learning environment is highly compatible with employability-enhancing policies and practices. Along these lines, it is crucial to stress that employability development in higher education can only be substantially achieved at the programme level, through the creation of suitable learning environments, rather than through bolt-on activities and isolated interventions. To that end, this study’s findings suggest that the heterogenous skill-building effects resulting from exposure to programme-specific features should not be underestimated.

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