Is Employability the Most Important to Students in Higher Education?

Author(s):

Huei Rong GaoTian Ming Sheu

Conference:

ECER 2010

Network:

22. Research in Higher Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

22 SES 01 C, Employability and Transition to Work of Higher Education Graduates.

Paper Session

Time:

2010-08-25

09:15-10:45

Room:

M.B. SALI 16, Päärakennus / Main Building

Chair:

Mariana Gaio Alves

Contribution

Employability becomes more and more emphasis on higher education institutions. That is because awareness of output/outcome and accountability, higher education institutions is expected to produce visibly results: “employability” as regards teaching. That is also why employability becomes an increasing emphasis on substantive issue in the courses of the Bologna Declaration (Teichler, 2009). Take world universities’ ranking criteria and weights of “the Times Higher Education Supplement” as another example, the ranking criteria “graduate employability” is accounted for the total scores of 10% (The Times Higher Education Supplement, 2009).

When whole world is paying attention to strengthen the employability of students, as students share the same view too? We know, the goals of higher education institutions are very important to students, when students into the classroom will based on their different backgrounds, so that have different expectations. When students’ expectation is different from actuality, they will fell conflict (Miller, Bender, & Schuh, 2005).

Therefore, in this study, we want to get more insight to the expectations of students for higher education institutions. There are three interesting questions to discuss: do students in higher education agree employability is the most important criterion to them? Do students from different academic fields share the same view? If students have different view from higher education institutions, why and how will we explain it?

Method

This research used survey method with a questionnaire of “Taiwan Integrated Postsecondary Education Database”, which is a national database, longitudinal survey for collecting information from students and teachers in higher education (Peng, 2006). The subjects of this research were 25,169 juniors, and they were asked about how following expectations is important to them: 1. acquiring knowledge and skills applicable to specific job or type of work or for further education; 2. gaining a broad general education about different fields of knowledge; 3. gaining employability; 4. to build interpersonal networks; 5. becoming aware of different philosophies, cultures, and ways of life; 6. understanding yourself, your abilities, interests, and personality; 7. understanding new development in social environment and the trends.

Expected Outcomes

According to the survey, we found that juniors regard “gaining a broad general education about different fields of knowledge” as the most important expectation for higher education institutions, the following expectations are: “becoming aware of different philosophies, cultures, and ways of life”, “understanding yourself, your abilities, interests, and personality”, “to establish interpersonal networks”, “acquiring knowledge and skills applicable to specific job or type of work or for further education”, and the last are “understanding new development in social environment and the trends” and “gaining employability”. Such result is quite different from higher education institutions which regard employability as very important. However, we also found that students from different academic fields have different ranking: students of law and industrial engineering field ranked “gaining employability” as the third. This research can help us reflect why students don’t think employability is so important for them, and maybe we should take different academic fields into consideration.

References

Miller, T. E., Bender, B. E., Schuh, J. H. (2005). Promoting reasonable expectations: Aligning student and institutional views of the college experience. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Peng, S. S. (2006). Taiwan Integrated Postsecondary Education Database: Juniors investigation in 2005 (research version). Taipei, Taiwan: Center for Educational Research and Evaluation. Teichler, U. (2009, November). The Professional Relevance of Study: Experiences and Reflections from Europe. Paper presented at the International Forum on Higher Education, Taiwan. The Times Higher Education Supplement (2009). Methodology. Retrieved December 15, 2009, http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/methodology/simple-overview

Author Information

Huei Rong Gao

National Taiwan Normal University

Department of Education

Taipei

Tian Ming Sheu

Department of Education, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan, Republic of China

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