Opinion piece
By Tom Karmel
LH Martin Institute’s September eNewsletter
Some years ago I wrote a paper titled 'Is VET vocational? It looked at the match between the courses VET students undertook and their subsequent jobs. I concluded that apart from the traditional trades and a couple of other courses, the match was poor. I argued that much of VET needs to be thought of as general education, if with a vocational orientation. The recent, albeit short lived, announcement of the Gillard ministry, with the minister for post-school education having the title 'Jobs, skills and workplace relations' - and no mention of education- prompted me to pose the question of whether higher education is becoming more vocational.
This is not a new question but is one worth looking at again in light of recent developments in post-school education and the labour market. In Australia, it is easy to mount an argument that the main driving force behind university education has been the demands of the professions, rather than the value placed on a liberal education. While there have always been large numbers undertaking broad arts and science degrees it is the professional courses such as medicine and engineering that have been the more prestigious faculties. Business schools have grown at the expense of the more abstract thinking taught in economic departments. Universities have largely been about educating skilled workers; not producing scholars.
I don’t really want to get into an argument about the merits of vocational education compared to the liberal arts and theoretical sciences. For starters, I haven’t defined what I mean by vocational— a broad definition such as education for specific occupations would immediately label the majority of higher education as vocational in intent. The specific point I wish to make is that over time universities are embracing more and more occupations not previously associated with higher education.
This may be defined as skills deepening, by which I mean increasing levels of qualified people within occupations. To see what effect skills deepening is having I am reviewing how the distribution of qualifications across occupations is changing. I do this by comparing the distribution in 2006 with that of 1996, and by comparing the two age cohorts of 25-34 year olds and 55-64 year olds in respect of 2006. The advantage of the latter is that the two cohorts are 30 years apart.
Interesting points to emerge are:
• Bachelor degrees are dominating a whole range of occupations where previously there were very large numbers of diploma holders. For example, among the 55-64 year group in 2006 there were eight out of 397 occupations which I categorise as professional (university), defined as those occupations in which 85% of people have a degree. But for the 25-34 year group there were 35 occupations thus labelled. Examples of occupations in this category for 25-34 year olds but not 55-64 year olds were dieticians and social workers.
• Degree holders are pushing others down the occupational pecking order. So among 55-64 year olds with a diploma, 40% had jobs in the top 20% of jobs (ordered by skill level), but this drops to around 10% for the corresponding 25-34 year old group.
• Higher degree holders are also suffering from qualifications inflation. In 1996 around 80% of those with a higher degree had jobs in the most skilled 20% of jobs, but this drops to a little over 60% in 2006.On a more positive note, the proportion of people with a degree in a lower skilled job (say, the bottom 50% of jobs) has remained quite low.
Many of these changes are probably an inevitable implication of mass higher education. While there is no doubt that changes in the economy are leading to more highly skilled jobs, the expansion in higher education goes well beyond that.
As a matter of simple arithmetic the proportion of individuals in specific occupations is increasing; therefore it is not surprising that a degree today does not guarantee the same high status job that it might have thirty years ago.
My analysis is purely descriptive. It does not go to the return on investment in higher education and how that might be changing. However, for those that do such calculations, it is worth noting that the average returns can be high but the return for those on the tail of a distribution may be low— which just goes to show that a liberal arts degree should include a fair proportion of statistical theory, or at least economics, not just history and philosophy.
Tom Karmel is the Managing Director of the National Centre for Vocational Education Research.