This study presents findings from a new survey instrument, Views on Higher Education and Workforce Preparedness, designed to evaluate the perspectives of academic staff, private sector employees, and students involved in an international, donor-funded university-private sector partnership (U-PSP) initiative in the Western Balkans, which began in 2023. The instrument assesses whether university students need specific professional soft skills and whether stakeholders believe graduates currently possess these skills. 

Globally, higher education has been in a reform cycle for the past 40 years, routinely renegotiating its social contract with society (Gornitzka, et al, 2007; Jungblut & Maassen, 2020). As this pact evolves, employers are playing a larger role (McGuinness Jr. & Jones, 2024). Correspondingly, conceptions of “serving” students focuses on universities readying them for the workforce so students can meet employers’ demands for skilled labor in key sectors, leading to economic growth (Reyes Rios, 2022; Zimpher & Martin, 2024). As such, universities must pursue organizational strategies and/or reforms that assure students not only acquire specific content knowledge (robotics, ecology, etc.) required for industry, but also the soft skills to be competitive and professionally successful. 

With the focus on higher education’s potential to serve the economy, international donors are increasingly directing their support to encourage the development of U-PSPs (Schiller & Brimble, 2009; Hagelsteen, 2024). U-PSPs have attracted much interest as an approach to capacity development, or activities implemented to enhance individual talent, and/or institutional effectiveness (Hellstrom, 2017; OECD/DAC, 2006) for developing countries (Hagelsteen, 2024; Hart et al., 2021). These partnerships can be critical for improving education (Ssebuwufu, et al., 2012) and boosting economic growth, competitiveness, and innovation (Freitas, et al., 2013; Malairaja & Zawdie, 2008), while promoting youth empowerment by reducing unemployment (Busson, 2020). U-PSPs are a sustainable strategy worth the investment.  

Our analysis utilizes data gathered from stakeholders: students and academic staff at 3 public universities and employees representing over 40 private sector companies in Kosovo. These stakeholders are affiliated with the information and communications technology sector (ICT) and the agriculture sector (AG), which were identified by the donor for their economic growth potential. The first phase of relationship building between universities and the private sector revealed that there were no shared expectations about what sorts of professional skills students need. The intention for the Views on Higher Education and Workforce Preparedness survey was to generate mutually agreed upon goals and to inspire consensus among stakeholders that would drive changes in the curriculum, students’ experiential learning opportunities, and professional development.  

Here, we seek to answer a series of empirically and conceptually rich, practically applicable research questions: (a) To what extent do university stakeholders express a desire for students to possess a set of professional soft skills? (b) To what extent are current graduates perceived as posing these soft skills? (c) In what ways do stakeholders’ individual and organizational characteristics influence their views about what soft skills are needed? And do stakeholders’ aspirations shape their views about whether graduates of study programs currently possess these skills? 

To pursue these questions, we performed factor analysis on each of the three stakeholder samples – student, academic, and professional—yielding four parsimonious soft skill clusters measuring: Adaptive Reasoning, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Digital Data Literacy, and Applying Knowledge. The factor reliabilities are all above a= .70, with most higher than a= .80. Our manuscript will explore the background and literature on our topic, followed by the construction of the instrument and the psychometric properties. We then present findings from a series of linear regressions to answer our research questions.   

Data are drawn from Views on Higher Education and Workforce Preparedness survey developed for the U-PSP, along with stakeholder directory information. The University of Iowa (USA), College of Education (COE) is the Implementing Partner for this donor activity in Kosovo, and led the stakeholders through the development of the survey. (Note: The COE is housed in the Lindquist Center, named for educational testing pioneer E.F. Lindquist, and continues to produce the nation’s leaders in testing and measurement.) Many international educational development and capacity building initiatives have focused on assessing secondary students’ work-ready competencies (Hoskins et al., 2011); however, rather limited attention has been paid to tertiary education, especially so globally. Within the existing international literature, it tends to focus on individual outcomes rather than assessing the stakeholder’s collective views. (Individual level examples include: USAID’s (n.d.) Soft Skills measure in the Youth Power 2 project, IEA’s (n.d.) research reports from their ICCS survey waves, and World Learning’s WorkLinks Skills and Values Assessment (n.d.).) The focus on individual-level measures offers a bit of a practical dilemma since educational organizations tend to be the target of interventions or reforms. Organizational interventions create a demand for organizational-level data that can help target improvements and monitor changes over time. Ideally then, the development of organizational-level measures that assess the stakeholders’ collective views about professional soft skills, are a crucial piece in devising a means for universities and companies to cooperate to pursue strategies that grow students’ soft skills. The Views on Higher Education and Workforce Preparedness items were developed with data teams at the three universities and the University of Iowa experts. The soft skills items reflect the universities’ Balkan context, relevant literature, prior empirical work on workforce needs (Finley, 2021). In the spring of 2024, 998 individuals were invited to participate (comprised of 59% students, 12% academics, and 28% professionals). It total, 609 people responded, yielding an average response rate of 61%. Among the 609 survey respondents, the samples are representative of the population invited: 60% are students, 12% are academics, and 29% are professionals. Items assessed one’s level of agreement on an ordered scale from 1 to 5, indicating: strongly disagree (1); disagree (2); neither agree or disagree (3); agree (4); and strongly agree (5). The survey received approvals from the human subjects review board of the University of Iowa, and data were gathered using the Qualtrics electronic survey interface.

We performed exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis using principal component varimax rotation to generate 8 factors (4 factors corresponding to respondents’ aspirations or whether they agreed that these “should be” desirable soft skills, and 4 factors corresponding to respondents’ current assessment of graduates’ soft skills) yielding reliability ratings of a = 0.713 to 0.908. The factors included measures for Adaptive Reasoning (4 items), Interpersonal Effectiveness (3 items), Digital Data Literacy (3 items), and Applying Knowledge (5 items). We generated reliabilities for all cases and each sample group: students, academics, and professionals. The overall reliabilities across the samples are: Adaptive Reasoning (a =0.814, aspirations, a = 0.867 current graduates), Interpersonal Effectiveness (a =0.786, aspirations, a = 0.809 current graduates), Digital Data Literacy (a =0.797, aspirations, a = 0.814 current graduates), and Applying Knowledge (a =0.831, aspirations, a = 0.884 current graduates). We standardized item variables, multiplied each by its factor weight, and calculated the mean of the four products to generate factor scores for each case. Each factor was then standardized. For each sample group, we generate a series of linear regression models to assess the relationships between respondents’ personal (e.g. sex, age, educational background, ethnicity, year in school for students) and organizational characteristics (e.g. university, faculty, study program, company) and their aspirations for Adaptive Reasoning, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Digital Data Literacy, and Applying Knowledge. Then, we assess respondents’ personal and organizational characteristics and their views about whether current graduates possess the 4 soft skills clusters. Finally, we place the current views of each soft skill as four separate dependent variables for each sample and include personal and organizational characteristics along with the corresponding aspirations for the relevant soft skill. In total, we are generating 12 regression models for each sample. We will report linear estimates as b values.

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