Transcript Higher education and labour markets: looking for solutions to contrasting needs Marino Regini Department of Labour and Welfare Studies University of Milano Paper presented at OECD/France.

Higher education and labour markets:
looking for solutions to contrasting needs
Marino Regini
Department of Labour and Welfare Studies
University of Milano
Paper presented at
OECD/France International Conference “Higher Education to 2030”
Workshop on “Labour market changes and the future of higher education”
Paris, 8-9 December 2008
Up to 30 years ago
Contacts between universities and business were
sporadic and infrequent, at least in Europe
HE and business were two separate worlds with regard
to objectives, values, organizational models; and both
were firmly convinced that was the way it should be.
• “Elite” university systems
• “Fordist” production systems
Last 30 years:
scenario radically changed
• “Mass university”:
− “employability” of university graduates
− from securing autonomy of teaching to verifying learning
outcomes
− student orientation and placement services
− demand for greater efficiency, autonomy and evaluation
• “Post-fordism” and knowledgebased economies
Relationships between HE and LM
Two major problems
1. How to estimate the actual need
for human capital?
2. A demand for what kind of skills?
1. How to estimate the actual
need for human capital?
 To what extent do companies have instruments that can effectively
anticipate their needs for highly skilled human capital?
 Do they rely on skills they actually use given current organization of
work, or can they anticipate the skills that would be useful to improve
such organization?
 To what extent do they demand only competences they can
immediately use instead of those which could increase their
innovation capacity?
 To what extent do they give priority to increasing and diversifying
their store of internally available knowledge even if it exceeds their
short-term needs, as a strategic element to make the company flexible
and versatile, thereby enabling it to adjust more rapidly to volatile
markets?
Debate on
over-education and mismatch
• Assumption that, for highly trained human
capital, demand for skills should guide the
supply of graduates
• However, a large reservoir of human capital,
though it is seen as a mismatch to existing
demand in T0, may become a prerequisite for a
company’s capacity to innovate, to reposition
itself on the market, to enhance its
competitiveness in T1
Literature on the
“varieties of capitalism”
 “Low road” to competitiveness of
national economies, based on low
skill–low wage–low product quality–
low price equilibrium
vs.
 “High road” based on high skills,
high wages, high product quality and
high prices
Implications for HE
in the future
 The main future challenge for relationships with labour
market is to be sensitive to employability of graduates,
but at the same time capable to anticipate range and
type of skills needed by innovative economies, without
depending on short-term demands from employers
 The worst way to tackle this future challenge would be
for HEI to simply look at past records of graduates’
employment and strictly adjust their curricula, teaching
methods, research objects, to such records. In this way
they would avoid major mismatch between supply of
graduates and current demand, but would amplify the
problem of adjusting to rapid obsolescence of
technologies and skills
2. A demand for what kind of skills?
Kind of training that companies would like
universities to provide so that graduates
can be best equipped to enter the labour
market:
 very specialized or wide-range knowledge?
 mainly technical or social and relational
skills?
Company size
as key determinant of demand
 SMEs tend to favour basic technical and workoriented training. They prefer vocational track of
tertiary education over academic track, where a
binary system is in place
 Medium-large enterprises are usually satisfied
with technical knowledge provided by
universities, since they can easily supplement it
with firm-specific training, while they often
complain about the lack of social and relational
skills
Variation in the mix of skills that
business will demand
Variation mainly depends on a set of institutional
and organisational features of economies and
is likely to produce a variable impact on the
structure of HE:
A. one such variable is the degree of job
turnover in a labour market
B. another such variable is the degree of
orientation to customer in the production of
goods and services
A. Degree of job turnover
in a labour market
Depends on institutions of job security and on
organisational patterns of firm
 A labour market with high percentage of stable
jobs, for either institutional or organisational
reasons, will put a premium on specific skills
produced by HE and required for those jobs
 On the contrary, an economy where unstable
jobs are predominant will require mostly
generic, basic skills, which can be used in a
plurality of work situations
B. Degree of orientation to customer
in production of goods & services
 Some companies compete on ability to adjust rapidly to
changing demand, or to work in strict cooperation with
customers in the development of goods and services
 Others find competitive advantage in providing hightech and high-quality products and services, hence
operate in markets dominated by producers rather than
by consumers
 What the latter demand of HE is mostly provision of
high technical skills
 The former will look for graduates who have not just
technical knowledge but also a range of social
competences
Implications for HE
in the future
Best way to tackle such variability and uncertainty
would be providing students with a mix of
competences:
 specific professional skills highly demanded by
the labour market
 broad multi-disciplinary training that allows
graduates to adjust to variable and rapidly
changing work contexts
 social skills highly appreciated by employers