Abstract
ABSTRACT Building on existing critiques of contemporary arrangements in higher education, this paper focuses on the claim that the human capital model undermines the civic or public role of universities, restricts student engagement with learning and damages the capacity for critical thinking and empathy. Interviews with students studying either Business or Sociology at universities in Britain and Singapore reveal very different orientations to higher education, personal success and civic responsibility. Those studying Sociology emphasised the importance of developing empathy and critical thinking, and were more able to identify civic and non-economic benefits of their time at university, compared to those studying Business, who focussed on gaining individual competitive advantage and enhancing their job prospects. The paper concludes by considering the significance of these differences to argue that appealing more broadly to a fuller range of student motivations is necessary to counter wider trends of instrumentalism and individualism.
Highlights
The idea that students attend university to enhance their job prospects has become so pervasive that it largely goes unchallenged in public or policy discourses
Building on existing critiques of contemporary arrangements in higher education, this paper focuses on the claim that the human capital model undermines the civic or public role of universities, restricts student engagement with learning and damages the capacity for critical thinking and empathy
Interviews with students studying either Business or Sociology at universities in Britain and Singapore reveal very different orientations to higher education, personal success and civic responsibility. Those studying Sociology emphasised the importance of developing empathy and critical thinking, and were more able to identify civic and noneconomic benefits of their time at university, compared to those studying Business, who focussed on gaining individual competitive advantage and enhancing their job prospects
Summary
The analysis revealed key similarities between those studying the same subject in both Britain and Singapore: in general, whilst those studying Business made sense of competition and fairness in society in individualistic terms, those studying Sociology drew on constructions of moral responsibility and, perhaps unsurprisingly, gave more structural accounts of inequalities These different negotiations of neoliberal individualism and social citizenship suggest that student perceptions of responsibility and civic mindedness were influenced by institutional and subject-specific as well as state-level discourses. That participants in both national contexts studying in a discipline that emphasises the importance of developing empathy and critical skills were able to articulate the civic and non-economic value of HE, compared to those studying Business, suggests that the practice of studying Sociology plays an important role in the development of these traits Put another way, the discipline specific knowledge and learning practices of the social sciences provide some shelter from dominant neoliberal norms, and may contribute to a re-framing of student appraisals of individual responsibility, civic mindedness and fairness. This tension or ambivalence in these students’ appraisals of success, personal responsibility and civic mindedness suggests that whilst for some, university provides a shelter from dominant neoliberal norms, enabling them to experience a sense of the ‘civic’, it is unclear whether they will be able to apply this transformative experience in their adult lives
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