`Working for your future': The rise of the vocationalised university.

Universities are at a pivotal point in their history and are undergoing dramatic changes. One of the more significant of these changes is the move towards more instrumental programs of learning, as manifest, for instance, in workplace approaches to learning. This paper argues that this trend threatens the existence of the liberal university that was isolated from the economy and where knowledge was acquired for virtue rather than utility. This university is being superseded by the vocationalised university in which the dominant educational imperative is learning for employment. It is argued that the emergence of this new form of the university is evident in the symbolic economy surrounding higher education, in its advertising and promotional stratagems.

   If you try to make universities like commercial institutions, you destroy
   everything that makes them valuable. Better the other way round. Model
   industry on universities. Make factories collegiate institutions. (Lodge,
   1988)

Institutional re-engineering is a product of the neo-liberalist policies many western governments have enacted to of get the ongoing crises of late capitalism. These policies, whose efficacy remains to be demonstrated, have decimated the architecture of the welfare state and undermined public health and education. Higher education, once regarded as the benchmark of the post-war egalitarian state, now appears to be returning to a bastion of the privileged. The commitment to increasing the rates of participation in higher education, though not totally diminished, seems threatened by the shift to user-pays philosophies. The dangers of the wholesale application of these philosophies to public goods such as education have been subject to legion commentary. Most critics suggest that the dangers are obvious to see and are already manifest in the generalised impoverishment of public institutions (Ball, 1993; Gewirtz, Ball, & Bowe, 1995; Marginson, 1997b; Peters & Marshall, 1996).

But universities, which are no strangers to the ravages of this impoverishment, also face other challenges from the exactions of the market. One of the more dramatic of these is their continuing charter as institutions epitomising a particular epistemological ethos marked by the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. This view of the university was grounded in the ideals of liberal humanism: that there was a place for a particular type of institution which was free to pursue an approach to learning which ranked virtue above utility. This was allied to the view that governments ought not to meddle in the affairs of education--a principle fast being abrogated in the advanced capitalist state (see Halliday, 1993; Passmore, 1989; Peters, 1992).

Although not unsympathetic to this view, this paper holds that the current trajectory of Australian higher education is giving rise to a new kind of university, a vocationalised university. This is one in which `training goods' (Marginson, 1995) and human capital have become paramount concerns and in which the values of the `real world', which were once spurned, dominate the ethos of the university (Bauman, 1995; Pan, 1998). This is not only evident in the strategic alliances now being formed between universities and industry but also in the emergence of more instrumental `faculties' in which teaching and learning are increasingly work based and work oriented.

It is argued here that there are a number of reasons for this shift towards a university in which the pursuit of utility and economic enrichment are dominant imperatives. The idea of education as a pecuniary good converges around a number of `regimes of truth' which give force to its adoption while marginalising those which, in the new context, appear romantic and idealist or, worse still, not in the national interest. These regimes have, it will be argued, given rise to a new moment in higher education which has been crystallised around a series of discourse manoeuvres on a number of battlefronts: policy, knowledge, labour market, research, iconography. The discourses involved have assisted to normalise higher education as a form of investment and are part of a broader trend towards the allotment of public goods via the market. Typically they construct the student as a consumer, treat knowledge as an economic asset, constitute the university as edu-business, turn higher education into the apprenticeship factory for the post-Fordist labour market, and so on. As this paper suggests, these normalising processes are at their most overt in the symbolic economy of education (Symes, 1998), in the advertising directed at prospective students.

I

The latest upheavals to beset the university, as dramatic as any in its long history (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997), have challenged the liberal ideal of a university, which was given its most forthright expression during the 19th century. This upheld the idea that as a seat of learning the university should be insulated from pragmatic and economic exigencies. The advocates of this view, of whom Henry Ernest Newman and John Stuart Mill were among the most prominent, held that the mission of the university centred on the `passage of the great outline of knowledge'. This was defined as that knowledge which was able to stand on its own pretensions without further ado, and whose study would abet the formation of a mind characterised by philosophical habit (Newman, 1870/1947). Knowledge was therefore to be studied for its own sake, for what it was rather than what it could do. Mill (1867/1971) also argued that the proper mission of university education lay with the acquisition of a general culture that would enlighten the `technicalities of a particular pursuit'. To this end, he railed, like Newman, against the professionalisation of the university; for he argued men are men [sic] before they are lawyers and doctors, and need to acquire the arts associated with cultivated human beings prior to a body of professional knowledge.

This excursus on the liberal university provides a powerful reminder of the degree to which the millennial university has transgressed the ideals of Newman and Mill. Although there remain strong advocates of a `liberal education' (Arcilla, 1995), the idea of the university as an essentially liberal institution maintaining the values of western culture is now an anachronism. Radical thinkers have, in any case, derided the claims surrounding liberal education as perpetuating the excesses of the Enlightenment Project (Roland, 1993). Notwithstanding this ambivalence, the liberal university, even to its detractors, represents a benchmark discourse against which developments in higher education are frequently measured.

That universities have become unapologetically vocational in the last few decades is no accident of history but can be attributed to a number of factors. Of these, the rise of polytechnic education, variously expressed in different national systems in the 1960s and 1970s but having its roots in the `really useful knowledge' of socialist education, is the most pertinent. Grounded in the idea that work and pedagogy are co-extensive with one another (Ainley, 1994; Castles & Wustenberg, 1979), the polytechnics represented an alternative discourse of higher education, more closely aligned to the needs of industry and business, and that, grounded in more democratic approaches to knowing, were potentially progressive. The fact that under the terms of their charter they were far less autonomous than universities was intended to stop the incremental academicism that had seen similar sorts of institutions eventually acquire the status and benefits of fully fledged universities (Lowe, 1990). The advent of the polytechnic and its Australian equivalent, the institute of technology, ushered in by the Martin Report, was intended to create a line of higher education directly accountable to government. Indeed this new species of higher education was supposed to complement the work of the university and concern itself not so much with knowledge acquisition, as with training the technocrats required by modern industry and business. It was also supposed to attract a constituency of students for whom the application of knowledge was the main justification for study (Treyvaud & McLaren, 1976).

Dubious though these bifurcations were--that there were students who reasoned in practical rather than abstract terms, and that there ought to be institutions solely devoted to research and others to its application--the polytechnic stream of higher education was held to be a successful experiment. Not only had it made higher education accessible to students of more diverse backgrounds but it had, through pioneering more instrumental courses not previously available in universities, effectually redrawn the map of tertiary study (Pratt, 1997). The subsequent reorganisation of higher education, which saw a cessation to the logics of bifurcation and led to the reconstitution of colleges as universities, was accompanied by the demise of the liberal university and its replacement by an institution whose emphases were already, to some extent, foreshadowed in the polytechnic.

II

The spectre of utility which has directed higher education policy in the last decade has stemmed from a recognition that labour markets are now more demanding ones. The `symbolic-analytic services' that are said to dominate these markets require a more thoughtful labour force characterised by inventiveness and capacity for innovation (Reich, 1991; Rifkin, 1995). Typical of the shift from manufacturing to servicing, and associated with the demise of Taylorism, is the leisure industry which is centred on new forms of work such as sport and tourism. This is also an information-based industry, highly dependent on an educated workforce. Hence much importance is now attributed to the so-called `learning organisation' and to the idea that `learning pays', and that businesses, in order to remain competitive, must attend to the learning of their employees. This means affording them the opportunities to update their credentials as information workers (Ball, 1998; Confederation of British Industry, 1998; Drucker, 1993).

Not unrelated to this issue is the systematic re-temporisation of work that has occurred under the aegis of post-Fordism and in which a job for life has been replaced by more sporadic patterns of working, marked by periods of retraining and re-qualification. This has given rise to the discourse of lifetime learning, which is the cornerstone of West (Review of Higher Education, 1997) and Dearing (National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, 1997), of individuals constantly recredentialising themselves to maintain their position in a labour market. The acquisition of a portfolio of educational assets as a hedge against diploma inflation is made to appear as an element of career development. The fact that the labour market requires a more educated labour force, and those who are the most vulnerable to unemployment are among the least educated (see Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1997), has only served further to underline the importance of the university credential as the first rung on the employment ladder. Moreover, this is now a common perception among high school students (Marks & Fleming, 1999).

This trend towards academic instrumentalism has also been assisted by the development of strategic alliances between universities and industry. Universities are fast becoming the research and development divisions of multinationals. In the liberal university, most epistemological practice was discipline based and socially restricted. In the last decade, there has been a shift towards less exclusive forms of inquiry. Much research thus now tends to be transdisciplinary, is utility oriented, and involves teams of researchers working within and outside the academy, collaborating with industry partners and partaking in the business of technology transfer (Gibbons et al., 1994; Luke, 1998; Scott, 1995). This has led to fuzzier categories of knowing, centred on fields of study, which are less well defined than the disciplines of the liberal university. What has been called `Mode 2 knowledge' (Gibbons et al., 1994) has the potential to challenge the monopoly that universities have had over knowledge and research. This means it could overturn the pedagogic regimen of the university and its thraldom over higher education. But it also means that bodies of knowledge now exist in the academy, in stark contrast to its liberal predecessor, that have their provenance in the `real world'.

III

In a less than propitious fiscal climate, universities have now begun to proclaim themselves as part of the real world, as places whose interests and operations complement those of business and industry. Their mission statements bristle with statements to the effect that their activities are benefiting society and are ameliorating the economy. That the funding to universities has become dependent on their ability to fill quotas of students has also further emphasised their `academic capitalism' (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997) and their submission to the Darwinism of the market. The educational choices of students are critical, with the potential to make or break institutions and schools. On the broad front, these developments are symptomatic that the cloisters are coming down and being replaced by the philosophy of the supermarket aisle: not quite of special deals and cut-price courses but that cannot be far away!(1) Indeed the consumerisation of higher education has produced a marked series of responses inside and outside the university.

The first is the emergence of a number of advisory guides, providing the would-be consumer of higher education with a compendious assessment of Australia's universities. Via the discourse of the league table, these offer instantaneous comparisons of university with university on a range of educational measures including accessibility to public transport, quality of teaching within various faculties and, tellingly, graduate employability (Ashenden & Milligan, 1998). These guides only serve to reinforce the commodification of education and naturalise the belief that education is a service to which market criteria should apply. Moreover, in a context where higher education was more or less free, the fact that education is surrounded increasingly by the accoutrements of consumerism serves to suborn students into believing that education is primarily a mercantile activity. It naturalises a financial commitment to its acquisition as part of a pattern of a lifetime of self-investment in other personal goods such as health and superannuation.

The second, springing from inside their public affairs units, is the fact that universities have begun to spend large amounts of money on impression management. The development of a co-ordinated semiotic across the university, prescribing in fine detail how and under what circumstances this semiotic can be employed, is part of the image control that now pertains to universities and which gives them the `look' of a proper business. This also applies to advertising campaigns now being conducted by universities which pay special attention to the way a university `makes' itself desirable to the `consumers' of educational services (Fairclough, 1993; Kenway & Fitzclarence, 1998; Marginson, 1997a; Symes, 1998). This is another response to economistic re-formation of education: that it makes sense for universities to cultivate a distinctive brand of higher education that will commend itself to students and make a particular university's approach to pedagogy instantly recognisable and appealing. These same mercantile impulses also extend to sponsorships, to universities becoming billboards for other products on such items of university property as identity cards. Those of the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) are a case in point: they carry a Coca Cola logo. The resonances are quite compelling--for the university of the real world why not the real thing?--as are the contradictions--a university with a large faculty of health promoting a beverage whose nutritional credentials are dubious to say the least.

As has been argued elsewhere, the uptake of these market discourses has produced various types of branding based around the unique set of conditions, not always academic, appertaining to particular universities (Symes, 1996). Thus Sydney has developed an advertisement which draws attention to its heritage-listed buildings--metonyms for its past academic traditions and upon which the future, signified using its home page, must build--at least, according to the copy. Tasmania has extolled its proximity to world heritage environments as a selling point. Other universities, which do not have history or an ecological utopia on their sides, have emphasised different strengths in their promotional ploys. New South Wales, for example, has promoted itself as `one of the world's leading universities', whose degrees create waves virtually everywhere, a fact illustrated in one of its advertisements by a ripple `courtesy NSW' in the waters off Manhattan. It also boasts, like other universities of its ilk, that its courses require a particular type of academic toughness to be negotiated.(2) Western Sydney, on the other hand, which has neither Sydney's history nor New South Wales's world-class standing, has stressed the fact that its students are encouraged to be individuals in the over-crowded world of alumni. This is alluded to in the rather vernacular punchline of one of its recent advertisements which states that `U can be you at UWS' and which also, presumably, gives voice to its acceptance of its largely multi-ethnic and working-class constituency from which it draws the bulk of its students.

These semiotic manoeuvres highlight the degree to which universities have begun to position themselves in various ways within the unified national system, exploiting the heterogeneity already inherent in the system prior to its unification. Reflecting this, as Marginson (1997a) has noted, there are now four distinctive types of university making up Australia's higher education system:

* the sandstones, those like Sydney which brandish their historical traditions with gusto and pose as an Ivy League downunder;

* the wannabees, the sandstones without sandstone traditions but which make claim to similar academic values;

* the utechs, the real world universities, that draw on the polytechnic tradition and are strong on links to business and commerce, and consistently emphasise employability;

* the new universities that give priority to students and teaching but are generally weaker in domains such as research.

In spite of these differences, to which the symbolic economy of higher education has given semiotic expression, there are, none the less, some features that are shared across the promotional stratagems of universities. One is the degree to which the leitmotifs of relevance and employment have become a dominant theme, evident not just in the promotional `literature' that now circulates at tertiary expositions and around university campuses, but also in the aforementioned guides to Australian universities. They are also evident university advertising, particularly that emanating from QUT and University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), which have been market leaders in terms of cultivating a semiotic of vocationalism.

Whereas in the early to mid-1990s the advertising of the sandstones emphasised the university as a place of opportunity and outstanding academic results, nurturing a passion for learning, that of the utechs was decidedly more instrumental, emphasising relevance to the workplace and the Get that their graduates obtained jobs. In the case of QUT this was framed around a set of other messages, a series of variations on the theme of QUT being a `university for the real world'. This was a university in touch with the real world, whose academic staff had `real world experience', as did (because they partook in practical work with `real world employers') the students. The overworked adage `real world' is in fact an adroit piece of sloganeering. It clearly exploits the widespread impression that the majority of academics--not those at QUT of course--are not engaged with the real world, whatever that might mean. In aligning itself to this very mythical but none the less discursively powerful real world, QUT embarked on a different academic pathway altogether, one valorising work and practice, the features of Mode Two knowledge.

UTS, which in one of its advertisements is described as `a university with its sleeves rolled up', follows the QUT pathway but also emphasises the degree to which its courses mesh theory with practice. This thereby distances UTS from those other universities in the system that provide too much theory, and explains why `the employment prospects of UTS graduates are among the best in Australia'. Similar rhetoric is employed in a recent advertisement from Edith Cowan University--one directed, interestingly, at prospective employers rather than students. This takes the message a little further than UTS and suggests that the `balance of theoretical and practical knowledge' in its courses means that when its graduates start work they will contribute to `the growth of your business almost immediately'.

Much of the copy involved in these advertisements plays deft language games, reaffirming certain themes, re-articulating others in more inventive ways. A QUT advertisement from the mid-1990s, for example, provides a commentary on real world education and its allied principle of instrumentalism, and suggests that the university has its own `theory' of theory, that it `works better with solid, relevant, practical experience'. Moreover it is one that has been tested in experience!

These advertisements extol the virtues of theory, but only in so much that it has palpable outcomes, that it is made to work. Thus much of their copy is designed in such a way as to countervail the fear that university study lacks relevance and provides affirmation that the university is tuned to the needs of the workplace. This parallels another fear that the rhetoric attempts to mitigate, which is that at graduation students will find it difficult to obtain work or the career of their choice. Almost without exception, it is a rhetoric that orchestrates, irrespective of whether it is true or not, the sense that university study equals a job, that degrees lift career prospects and that employers fling open their doors (an oft-used metaphor in the copy) to have graduates on their payrolls. Lest there be any ambiguity about the matter, one of QUT's recent advertisements declared, `Your career starts here', a message that was also emblazoned on a T-shirt which those advising at a recent tertiary expo were asked to don.

Although it was the utechs, because they claimed it was their niche, who were the first to emphasise employability, the sandstones and wannabees followed suit. Earlier on in this period of semiotic warfare, the sandstone Queensland had asserted it was a university of `first class opportunities ... in touch with the latest advances of knowledge', and made no mention of the employment opportunities of its graduates at all. Likewise Monash: it concentrated on its reputation as a world university, as an `entrepreneurial pacesetter' and that, with a portfolio of courses no other Australian university could match, it was looking to the future. By 1996 the copy had shifted to utech instrumentalism. Queensland was offering a `a degree that will clearly lift your career prospects' and `give you a headstart in your chosen career'. Monash, two years later, was using almost similar words, except that it exploited a differentiating rhetoric, placing the value of a Monash degree above others and making it the `first choice' of those wanting to realise their `career dreams'--for not only is it increasingly necessary for people to have university qualifications to secure jobs but they also need a `degree from a prestigious university'.

Here, then, a new `figure' enters the copy: that credentials have relative market value. Hence, if readers want to be `put in the picture' dominating the advertisement, which includes a selection of graduates working in a range of careers, they will have to select Monash as the university of their first choice. In a context in which competition is not just between institutions, but also within the same institution, the primacy of `training goods' as an important trope in the symbolic economy has become paramount. As universities have found themselves in competition with TAFE and private providers, whose forte is also training goods, they must more than ever convince their potential students that they offer credentials that are more advantageous for employment than those of their rivals.

The other notable transition in these semiotic manoeuvres is the degree to which their copy is `self-directed', and their readers, as in the Edith Cowan and UTS advertisements, are made to feel part of the picture through various pronominalisation strategies (Fairclough, 1993; Symes, 1996). These are enacted in two ways, on the institution and on the individual, and serve to personalise the copy through the use of `we', `you' and `us'. This draws attention away from the anonymity of what are large organisations. But they also suggest a deferent attitude on the part of the organisation that is typical of market-oriented businesses, that it is `we' who are working for you, not for ourselves, that it is `we' who have your interests and future in mind. This reinforces the degree to which the institution is submitting itself to the consent of its clients. It also serves to privilege them as having the rights that other consumers enjoy and further entices them to expect real outcomes such as employment from education. Moreover such messages also underline the importance of university credentials in bolstering career prospects--all of which place the onus on individuals to invest in their own education if they want a job. In order to earn, they must learn. This injunction is also grounded in the discourse of `possessive individualism' (Edwards, 1995): that self-aware individuals are more likely to make decisions salient to their own interests if they are able to exercise the maximum of free choice in the learning market.

IV

The discourse of the `real world' university is not just a phantasm of copywriters. Ever since Dawkins's institutional re-engineering, the favoured faculties have been the economically relevant ones, which have been gaining ground in the Darwinist university. Yet the trends away from the traditional faculties are not notably dramatic--although the consequences, namely the closure of schools and departments, sometimes are. For example, the distribution of all students by `broad field of study' as a percentage of the whole cohort of enrolments shows very little movement over the last 15 years in spite of the fact that during this period the number of enrolments has almost doubled (Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DEETYA), 1998). The most dramatic surges in numbers have been in health, where there has been an almost 100 per cent increase in students, which is partly explained by the admission of nursing into the tertiary arena, and business where numbers have increased by upwards of 30 per cent. With the exception of education which has experienced the most dramatic decline and relatively speaking halved its intake of students over this period, most fields of study have maintained their proportions of students. The broad field of study known as `art, humanities and social sciences', the most liberal of the fields in the DEETYA categories, is no exception. The difference in the percentages between the numbers enrolled in this field between 1983 and 1998 is only of the magnitude of 1 per cent--hardly a stampede to vocationalism.

Yet there are some signs in the 1998 statistics `on commencing students' that this is beginning to occur, though the flight is still not a stampede. The numbers enrolling in arts, for example, were clown 4 per cent on their 1997 numbers--this for the first time in the last 15 years; likewise engineering and education, which continues ever downwards, losing another 6 per cent. Not unexpectedly in a culture that idolises Mammon, business continues to make gains and was up by another 4 per cent; and so too do law and legal studies.

Yet these figures, based as they are on the components of each field of study, can only reveal a limited picture of the pattern, if any, of vocationalisation. For example, the field of arts, humanities and social sciences encompasses a range of epistemological categories, including very liberal ones such as philosophy and literary studies but also very instrumental ones too, such as conservation of art and cultural materials, and welfare studies. Thus although the number of students enrolling in this broad field of study has, until last year, been maintained, these numbers are, more than likely, distributed in the more vocational domains of the field. This is especially true in the former colleges of advanced education and institutes of technology, that were always more epistemologically diverse institutions, even in such vocational areas as engineering, than the majority of universities, and continue to be. For example, in 1993 it was possible to major in eight discrete

forms of engineering at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) compared with five at Sydney, a pattern which was repeated, if to a lesser extent in the arts degrees of these universities.

Of more note, however, is the kind of `arts' which constituted an RMIT Bachelor of Arts (BA): they were applied rather than `fine', with a particular emphasis on majors in communication studies such as media studies, public relations, graphic design--Mode Two fields. Sydney's BA, on the other hand, was more liberal and was framed around a traditional core of Mode One disciplines such as English and history (Gibbons et al., 1994) together with some post-1968 trans-disciplinary fields such as women's studies--a pattern of epistemological organisation which continues through to the present. Meanwhile at RMIT University, the BA has been diversified still further and now encompasses all even more extensive range of Mode Two majors including multimedia arts, tourism management, recreation and fashion. The proliferation of these new majors, along with the new extended taxonomy of degrees, is also a reflection of the finer division of labour that has emerged in the late modern workforce and to which the job specificity inherent in this taxonomy serves to draw attention, albeit in an abbreviated form.(3) The conspectus of degrees covered by universities is now considerable, encompassing such diverse areas as office administration and ambulance studies, and also reflecting regionalised industries such as viticulture.

The sandstones have been slower to respond to these changes in the learning market. To take just one instance: it is the utechs, wannabees and the new universities that have colonised the more applied style of BA, whereas the sandstones (with the exception of Queensland), perhaps because their disciplinary traditions are more ingrained, have generally steered clear of communication and media studies. Another trend apparent in the last five years is the emergence of the double degree, which in a shrinking labour market multiplies employment options. The growth of professional masters and doctorates is part of the same trend and a reflection of a labour force in which credentials are catalysts of career movement. As such, these developments are demand driven, reflecting the preferences students are currently expressing for Mode Two degrees, in business, health, computing (Jacobsen & Sutton, 1999) and which, along with retailing (not thus far strongly represented in higher education), are also growth areas in the labour market (Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training, 1999). UTS's course in graphic design, for example, attracted 1500 applications for a mere 50 places, and its degree in communication studies had high entry score cut-offs--a sign that a course is in demand, usually because its graduates are seen to secure high paying, `gold collar' jobs.

These expansions in the vocational offerings have now begun to exert an influence on the epistemological organisation of the university as a whole. In the last two years, for example, when the savage financial stringencies enacted on the higher education system by the Coalition Government have begun to bite, departments unable to attract students in sufficient numbers are being `rationalised'. Most of these rationalisations have occurred in the sandstones and the wannabees, and in faculties once regarded as the stalwarts of the liberal university. In 1998, for example, Melbourne threatened to close its classics department; La Trobe closed music and Hindi and environmental science; Northern Territory, its English department; Adelaide cancelled courses in philosophy, history and sociology; Tasmania, Italian and Classics; New England retrenched 15 staff from its arts faculty. Other significant closures have occurred in education--a poor performer in the new tertiary order--at the University of New South Wales, which shut its St George campus, and at UWS where departments of anthropology and drama were closed. Most dramatic of all was the reduction of 25 Monash departments in its Faculty of Arts to 12, and the loss of 60 staff positions (Maslen, 1998).

These developments suggest that the `cultural heritage courses', as the West report (Review of Higher Education, 1997) calls them and which it supports, clearly contradicting its otherwise utilitarian face, are on the decline and students are now demanding far more instrumental courses of learning. To some extent, universities, having invested much of their semiotic energy into branding themselves as places of vocational priority, have hoisted themselves on their own petard and should not be surprised that their students are turning to real world learning in droves. Indeed, the internal migration to the real world has reached such dramatic proportions that universities, with the support of government, are now devising rescue packages to ensure that their cultural heritage courses do not become extinct (Healy, 1999). Alternatively, steps are being taken to reconstitute them as Mode Two fields. The rise of communication studies in former literature departments is a case in point. An exception, at least on the surface, to this trend is Sydney's Bachelor of Liberal Studies: but even this degree is packaged in such a way as to emphasise its career opportunities.

The ultimate expression of this galloping vocationalism is the work-based degree, in which the curriculum constitutes work, and vice versa. That businesses now see themselves as learning organisations has given cogency to this development, as has government policy cajoling universities into closer alliances with industry and business--much along the lines described in Lodge's (1988) novel, from which this article take its epigraph. To this end, links have been made between a number of public universities, mostly in the United Kingdom and Australia for schemes of company-based tertiary education in the form of partnership degrees that are work based. The AMP/UTS masters degree in business is a case in point. The hybridisation of the private and public sector, of private sector colleges articulating with public universities, is another symptom of the deregulation of the learning market. That businesses now operate like learning organisations, and learning organisations like businesses--or that, like Melbourne University Private, are businesses through and through--is another aspect of marketisation that the adoption of neo-liberalist doctrine has sanctioned and which shows no sign of relenting.

V

The emergence of vocationalised higher education systems can be attributed to a number of factors, not the least of which is the acquiescence to human capital theory as a driving force behind recent education policy. Yet this theory has been discredited on the grounds that the extension of higher education systems to mass provision does not automatically produce economic benefits in the form of ameliorated national prosperity, nor lower levels of unemployment. The capacity of an economy to absorb a more educated labour force is limited, even one specifically trained in its growth areas (Marginson, 1997a). That is not to say that graduates do not obtain jobs; for, as the advertisements suggest, they mostly do, but not always in the fields that they have chosen. Recent statistics from the United Kingdom and Australia, for example, suggest that there is now a glut of graduates, which is forcing many of them into jobs and career paths for which they are overqualified and overskilled. According to one UK report, at least 30 per cent of graduates fall into this category along with a growing reserve of graduates who remain unemployed, which only breeds dissatisfaction about the job-earning power of degrees (see Ainley, 1994). In Australia, degree holders are still obtaining work but increasingly, at least according to a recent DEETYA report, in areas such as retailing and construction, industries not traditionally associated

with graduate employment (Richardson, 1998). One reason for this is diploma inflation and the decline in the positional advantaging effects of undergraduate qualifications, which reduces their purchasing powers on the jobs mart.

Yet this pressure to upskill the capacities of the population, seemingly catalysed by the advent of information technology, at least in the popular imagination, and which has provided a rationale for university attendance, is not born out by the dynamics of the labour market. As the magnitude of unemployment grows, particularly among young people, there is no evidence to suggest that the information economy that was supposed to absorb the milling numbers of graduates has eventuated, at least thus far. If anything, the evidence is contrariwise: that information technology is destroying not creating jobs. This technology has `dehumanised' factories, offices, banks, and shops, effectually creating a new proletariat: machines. The twin forces of computerisation and corporatisation, now working in symbiosis with one another, are gathering momentum and leading to the decimation of whole legions of the workforce on a scale not seen since the 1930s depression (Aronowitz & DiFazio, 1994; ACIRRT, 1999; Rifkin, 1995). This also has much to do with the rise of the financial industries--another area of growth, where investment in currency speculation produces almost immediate profits which investment in manufacturing cannot rival. Worse still is that dividends to shareholders have become a more important moral principle than jobs to workers. As a result, we now live in a society where work is in short supply, and what jobs there are, are increasingly travesties of real jobs, short term, casualised, contingent, offering few career opportunities or much in the way of long-term security. There are simply fewer parts for workers in the new work order and what there are, are mainly bit parts (Aronowitz & Di Fazio, 1994).

These trends are incompatible with the vocationalisation narrative underpinning higher education policy which creates the impression that society needs more graduates. As a strategy for absorbing the growing battalions of unemployed into a training culture, this narrative serves the interests of government, along with those of higher education. Yet, in a fast changing technological environment where skills only have transient use value, students might be better served if they followed the type of education that Mill and Newman defended, and in which it was the generality not the specificity of knowledge that had long-term use value.

VI

This article has argued that vocationalisation is a marked feature of recent higher education, and has its provenance in public policy emphasising the importance of universities in the modern economy. This represents a radical departure from the traditional idea of the university as peripheral to the economy, which concerned itself primarily with personal enrichment through the vehicle of culture. Making higher education economically relevant has also much to do with the changing labour market and the emergent demand for workers familiar with the knowledge economy. This has seen the emergence of more specialised courses in the university, aligned with the training demands of industry and business. These developments have occurred concurrently with the ongoing marketisation of higher education which has seen the fiscal burden for its financing shifted from the government to the individual, via such mechanisms of self-financing as the higher education contribution scheme, from the government to the individual. These have transformed students into consumers, who invest in their own education as part of a process of self-enterprise.

It has been argued that this view of education as a commodity has required a set of normalising discourses for its acceptance. The symbolic economy of the university has helped promote this acceptance, along with the idea that education is primarily a pecuniary good, vital in the acquisition of a career and for the economic health of the nation. These discourses, in effect, have helped to sustain the market in higher education but increasingly only in areas that are strongly vocationalised and concerned with Mode Two knowledge. In the climate of competition and market forces, the more liberalised parts of the university are increasingly under threat. This could threaten other important functions of the university, to do with citizenship and the maintenance of democratic values, functions that have no obvious economic value but could cost the community dearly if they are not supported.

Yet, as the latter parts of the article argue, the human capital view of education is one that the current labour market cannot, except for small groups of elite workers, sustain in the long run. In such a context, the re-engineering of the university to produce training goods could be regarded as an opportunistic and dangerous move. If the seeds of their dissolution are not already apparent in the cross-breeding now occurring between higher education and business, then universities, robust though they have been in the past, might not survive beyond the initial decades of the next century. In which case, they might not be working for our future at all.

Keywords

advertising educational policy higher education semiotics university business relationship universities

Acknowledgement

In writing this paper, whose title is drawn from the slogan of UTS, I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Audrey Brown.

Notes

(1) And may have already arrived. UWS, for example, is offering to pay HECS for research students. The spectre of the market haunting academic practices raises a series of dangers that current policy does little to exorcise. These mainly relate to the value of credentials, when institutions undercut their competition in order to increase their share of the market (Bauman, 1995).

(2) Elitism appears to be becoming a selling point! In a letter written in 1999 to successful HSC students who had included the University of Sydney in their UAC preferences, the Vice-Chancellor makes the point that the university is `constantly looking for students of high calibre' and is keen for them to `make the best possible choices about [their] studies'.

(3) The range of non-standard degrees includes BPopMus (Pop Music) and BExSc (Exercise Science) to BRadMedlmag and BSp&ResRec (Sports and Resource Recreation).

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Colin Symes is a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), PO Box 123, Broadway, New South Wales 2007. ([e-mail])

Colin Symes University of Technology, Sydney