Understanding the Effectiveness of Higher Education System: Evidences from Market Outcomes of Early University Graduates in Seven European Countries

Zhen Yue,Kai Zhao

doi:10.3390/su12187761

Abstract

Being enlightened by Richard Florida’s seminal work on the creative class, this paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of higher education institutions to cultivate a workforce with utilised skills that meet the demand of labour market in the context of sustainable socio-economic development. Based on the macro and micro data generated from Eurostat and the Europe Labour Force Survey (EU LFS), the supply and demand condition of early graduates and the mismatch rate between early graduates’ education backgrounds and actual jobs they undertook are estimated by a multinomial logit model in seven European countries. The findings suggest that, (1) higher education has a significant impact on the formation of specific sustainability competencies that contribute to the development of creative economy; (2) many creative workers also have a high probability of finding jobs that are not commensurate with their qualifications; (3) the effect of higher education policies appears to be heterogeneous across different countries. Therefore, we argue that policy makers should increase awareness about connecting internal measures of education system (e.g., course design) directly to aims and scopes of sustainable socio-economic development scenarios, and joint efforts shall be made to reduce such mismatch rates for particular subjects that are identified by regular monitoring procedures or programmes on the basis of full consideration of interests and reasonable requirements across different countries in Europe.

Highlights

In the so-called fourth industrial revolution, sustainable development (SD) has been recognized as one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century
Faster growth of graduates in some countries than in other countries were identified, and in terms of producing specific creative jobs, the job landscape of these countries are even more diversified. This may imply that the Lisbon strategy functioned effectively to some extent in promoting human capital via higher education, while remained limited when considering a more concrete match between sustainability competencies cultivated in higher education and creative occupations, in the fourth industrial revolution where no less than 54% of all employees will require significant re- and up-skilling by 2022, which requires that individual talents have appropriate skills enabling them to thrive in the job market [37]
This paper provides scholars and practitioners in relevant fields with a novel perspective to assess the effect of higher education policies on sustainable socio-economic development, and to a certain degree, reconciles the existing research gap in both higher education and creative class studies, and the data adopted in this study per se contributed in building integrated information systems for making good governance decisions

Summary

Introduction

In the so-called fourth industrial revolution, sustainable development (SD) has been recognized as one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. Skills across cognitive, social, and emotional domains (e.g., creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving etc.) in responding to the current socio-economic climate of the 21st century, for enhancing quality of education, individual well-being, and social progress. In such a context, scholars and practitioners have identified an urgent need to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching and learning experiences in higher education systems for achieving sustainability [6]. The existing research remains a “bottom-up” orientation with a careful examination of the internal “teaching-program design-learning” process in assessing the effectiveness of higher education systems, as the Critical Social Transformative Learning Theory [10,11] suggested, evaluating and improving the effectiveness of a higher education system should be situated in a broader context of socio-economic development, in this sense, a “top-down” orientation with taking account of socio-economic factors to evaluate if students’ learning outcomes, acquired skills, and competencies meet the requirement for the development of a sustainable economy [9], such as to what extent the labour produced (i.e., graduates) by a higher education institution match the demand of a labour market (i.e., employment)

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Discussion

Conclusion