The amount of labor that goes into academic/research papers is invisible, and while some can bust out an article over a weekend, it's more common that the finished product you see took months or even years of writing, editing, revising, rejecting, and re-submitting. This is something that I teach to my students as it's a reality of the job that is not just unglamorous but often downright demoralizing and exhausting.
Case in point is this new literature review my amazing colleagues Jacklyn John Fischer, Kyoungjin Jang-Tucci and Hee Song at School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison just published on the influential (yet deeply flawed) concept of "employability." It took about 6 years just to complete (w/a pandemic & health issues intervening a bit)!
We studied how scholars around the world (very few in the US) conceptualized this influential idea (38 papers) and then operationalized it in empirical research (60 papers) between 2005-2020, and created a new nine-category diagnostic framework that captures key assumptions of employability scholars.
Our analysis found that a confusing profusion of definitions of employability persists in the field, and that one of the biggest limitations is the often unacknowledged embrace of human capital theory and its assumptions regarding causality, the nature of human #skill and socio-economic mobility, and the purpose of #highereducation itself. Our review also found that individuals’ possession of certain knowledge, #skills, and abilities (KSAs) continues to be seen as the primary if not the sole determinant of job acquisition (n=31, 51.6% of the papers in our review), that scholars predominantly focus on micro-level units of analysis (i.e., individual students) (n=46, 76.6%), the role group of students (n=29, 48.3%) and not colleges or employers, and practical recommendations focused on generic skills instruction (n=43, 71.6%) and #internships.
We conclude that the literature broadly (and inaccurately) ignores the structural forces that also shape if/how people get jobs, and instead perpetuate a myth of meritocracy and "skills" as the primary drivers of employment. Thus, we call for scholars to reject the term “employability” in favor of “employment prospects,” as it underscores how job acquisition involves a complex array of both “supply” (e.g., student KSAs) and “demand” (e.g., labor market conditions, hiring discrimination) factors. We end with 7 methodological questions that future scholars should consider such as issues w/causal inference, alternatives to human capital theory, the need to foreground student/worker voices, and the value of framing the purpose of higher education not solely as a financial ROI issue but also as an endeavor to benefit the common good.
https://lnkd.in/gf-yfbHu
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