The socio-cultural function of higher education has been often understood in relation to social reproduction, mobility and meritocracy in the Sociology of Education.  However, the changed societal context--such as mass graduate unemployment as well as relatively long-standing argument relating to underutilisation (for instance, see Mayhew, Deer and Dua 2004; Keep and Mayhew 2004), Dore’s ‘diploma disease’ and an opportunity trap (Brown 2006)--indicates that we need to recontextualise reproduction theory in relation to the function of the universities. 

  This paper reconsiders the social function of higher education in advanced capitalist societies, in particular in Japan, the UK and the US.  It pays attention to a change in the graduate labour market and conceptually connects higher education to graduate employment opportunities.  It utilises two conceptions of a ‘risk society’ (for instance, see Giddens 1999a, b, 1990 and Beck 1992) and neoliberal capitalism in order to explain the shift in the market.  This is a theoretical-driven paper.    

Objectives

The purpose of the study is to identify how the latest phase of neoliberal capitalism reshapes the graduate labour market and clarify what the implication for the social function of the universities sector is.  

Analytical inquiries

Analytical inquiries of the study follow: (1) How does capitalism redefine and reshape the graduate labour market?; and (2) What is the implication of such change for the social function of the university sector?   

Significance

There are a number of literatures which indicate the change in the graduate labour market (e.g., government employability policy, graduate underutilisation and demand-supply mismatch) in the last two decades; however, relatively few literatures provide the theoretical explanation on the change, which this paper deals with.  

Conceptual framework  

The link between the universities and the labour market has never fixed, but has changed over time.  The conceptual framework of the project is based upon the relationship between the universities and the labour market in the late modern society, which has an implication for the function of the universities.  

     It can be interpreted that the relationship between the universities and the labour market has become detached to significant degree.  The universities, no longer, connect graduates to employment, in particular to high-skill, high-wage professional jobs (as they did in the 1960s and the 1970s) except in skill-shortage occupations.  The observation suggests a limitation in the function of the universities to make students easier to access to the labour market and a new, negative social function, which is to pool the unemployed, prevent youths from detaching from the society completely and avert social uprising.  Higher education and employment opportunities, no longer, link firmly to each other. 

  It can be assumed that multiple factors such as globalisation, automation, neoliberalism (the decline of public sector employment, which is usually securer than that of the private sector), demography (absorption of the baby boomer population and increased participation in the labour market by women and in Anglophone countries by senior people as the result of the removal of compulsory retirement age), the development of e-commerce, higher education expansion and a general shift in industrial structure have changed graduate employment opportunities and working conditions permanently.  

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