In their examination of ten trends that will shape the future of the campus university, Edward Peck, Ben McCarthy and Jenny Shaw set out a compelling account of the factors that will shape English higher education. As a result of these factors, they argue that, in the future, ‘Academic awards will focus as much on the development of employment and generic skills as the acquisition and retention of specific knowledge’. Given that it is co-authored by a long-standing vice chancellor, who will shortly take on the role of the Chair of the higher education regulator, this can be read as an urgent call for higher education to be clear about how it produces graduates who will make important contributions to society.
While I agree that higher education needs to be open to discussing the value of its education for graduates and society, I do not think a convincing case can be made by focusing on the distinction between generic skills and specific knowledge. Instead, my argument is that higher education needs to develop a much better account of how the knowledge that students engage with through their degrees prepares them to make important contributions to society. There are four elements to this.
First, the development of generic skills and the acquisition of specific knowledge are not alternative educational objectives for degree programmes. Rather, they are different elements of a rich educational environment. More fundamentally, the educational power of higher education does not lie in either of these options. What is educationally powerful about higher education is the way in which it offers students access to structured bodies of knowledge. Seeing these bodies of knowledge from the inside gives students and graduates the opportunity to view themselves and the world differently. It is the structure of these bodies of knowledge that allows students and graduates to develop ways of engaging with the world that make use of this knowledge and related skills in a diverse range of contexts. Generic skills and specific knowledge are generated as part of this engagement with structured bodies of knowledge, but they are not where the educational treasure of higher education lies. Indeed, our seven-year international longitudinal study of those who studied degrees in Chemistry and in Chemical Engineering found that those who focused on specific knowledge rather than the ways of engaging with the world they gained from their degrees tended to benefit less from their education.
Second, showing that higher education is about gaining access to structured bodies of knowledge explains why it requires programmatic study over the three or four years of a degree. If it were simply about generic skills or specific knowledge, then there would be no need for the systematic and sustained engagement that we currently demand of students. Presenting higher education as about generic skills or specific knowledge risks it appearing very obvious that demanding several years of sustained study is an unnecessary and expensive luxury. It is only by showing the importance of students’ gaining access of bodies of knowledge that we can explain why alternative forms of higher education that are already boxing higher education in, such as micro-credentials, are not up to the job of supporting students to see these bodies of knowledge from the inside and engaging with the world from the perspective of this knowledge.
Third, understanding the importance of the structured nature of this knowledge helps to highlight the importance of producing graduates from a rich diversity of disciplinary, interdisciplinary and professional subjects, who engage with the world in different ways. Addressing the challenges facing the world will require drawing on the diversity of these perspectives which cannot be gained through being taught generic skills or unconnected stores of specific knowledge.
Fourth, ensuring that higher education maintains its focus on structured bodies of knowledge is key to challenging educational inequalities. Otherwise, it is entirely predictable that the education offered by ‘elite’ institutions will remain focused on structured bodies of knowledge while ‘mass’ higher education shifts to focus on generic skills. Given that those with the greatest resources are most likely to access elite higher education, the poor will be left with an education that leaves them rooted in the contexts in which they have developed their generic skills whereas the privileged will benefit from the ways in which structured bodies of knowledge support them to move between contexts.
The great higher education advocate David Watson urged universities and academics to ‘guard your treasure’. The treasure of higher education is the collective structured bodies of knowledge that we are stewards of for society. Our role is to support society and students to understand the power of this knowledge and what it can do in the world. In response to the important questions raised by Edward Peck, Ben McCarthy and Jenny Shaw, we need to develop much more compelling accounts of how access to these structured bodies of knowledge provides an education that is qualitatively different from an education focused on developing generic skills and specific knowledge. We need to show how this qualitative difference is crucial in offering a relevant education that has the potential to change students and society. If we fail to do this, then we are in great danger of throwing away our greatest treasure.
