HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Will handing curriculum design to industry solve the skills gap?

Wherever you are in the world, a constant complaint from industry is that universities are not producing graduates with the skills needed for today’s job market.

In the UK, for example, the latest skills survey conducted by the business lobby group CBI and Pearson found that one in four businesses had had to provide graduate recruits with remedial training in basic skills, and that a third had expressed concerns about university leavers’ attitudes and resilience.

In the developing world, these concerns are often even more pronounced. A recent survey conducted in India found that only a third of employers and industry representatives believed that graduates possessed the skills that they wanted.

How, then, can this problem be solved? The approach adopted by South Korea’s Incheon National University – handing control of curricula to industry and reducing lecturers to tutors tasked with delivering pre-prepared content – is at one end of the scale, but it could become more widely adopted as countries push forward in the global skills race.

Such an approach would appear to pose significant problems for scholars. Not only does it shrink their influence in an area in which they have developed significant expertise, but it also raises questions about whether teaching can be informed by the research being conducted by academics, seen as a key driver of student engagement and the development of critical thinking.

Well, yes. But it’s not clear that “scholars” are creating the value they once did.