Evolutionary Models for the Interaction of the Higher Education Labor Force and Higher Education Market

Abstract

The higher education market portends to be a huge market in the future that traditional systems of delivery of services will be insufficient. This paper proposes a model that links two (2) global markets: the higher education market and the labor market, as dramatic changes are taking place in the 21st century. A modeling and simulation strategy has been employed in this paper predicting the impact of higher education market to the labor market. Results indicated that with the rapid expansion of the Higher Education(HE) market, the size of the higher education labor force will inevitably expand.The labor market tolerates a maximum expansion capacity for HE graduates beyond which the excess HE graduates will bifurcate into two (2) channels of productive sector, namely: (a) the creation of new economies or (b) the integration of HE graduates into the skilled labor force. This dynamics necessarily yields a highly fragmented labor force configuration. In essence, the evolution of the labor market is a replica of Darwin’s Biological Theory of Evolution where only the fittest will survive, i.e. evolution through mutation and adaptation whose equivalent concepts in this setting are “innovation” and “adaptation” respectively. It is well-established in Evolutionary Biology that “mutation” is the shortest-route to evolution and so we posit that “innovation” is the shortest route to the labor market evolutionary ladder.Therefore, a good university must be able to produce graduates who are innovative and adaptive at the same time to survive in a competitive labor market.