To combat growing skepticism about the value of a college degree, colleges and universities in the U.S. and the UK have increasingly focused on enhancing and marketing the employability of undergraduate and postgraduate students. And while employability certainly matters, this focus shouldn’t come at the cost of remembering — and promoting — the values and skills that have long been so central to higher education, including those of public engagement, critical thinking, and contributing to human knowledge. These attributes have inherent value for their own sake and will also be especially valuable in the world and the workplaces of the future.
Why Employability?
Employability has been a primary focus of higher education leaders and marketers for numerous economic reasons. Where I am, in the UK, the government views all students, whether they are home or international students, as ‘customers’ who seek a return on their investment through successful job and entrepreneurial opportunities. Unlike the US system, most UK universities are publicly funded, where the government expects higher education to be ‘value for money’ for taxpayers.
According to the Office for Students (OfS), the higher education regulator in England, universities are evaluated partly on the employment outcomes of their graduates. In the U.S., that evaluation happens more informally but just as critically at the consumer level, as students and their families increasingly look to maximize the personal return on their investment. One factor that is not talked about as much in the U.S. is the overall economic contribution of higher education; in the UK this is approximately £130 billion, creating pressure for higher ed to maintain and grow such contribution to the economy.
Another perspective is to examine this from the viewpoint of government policy. The Higher Education Policy Statement expects that higher ed equip students with the necessary skills to support economic growth. Student number controls were put in place in the UK to manage the growth in courses that have ‘poor graduate employability and poor long-term earnings potential’. Access is no longer the sole focus for the OfS, but it is now directed towards achieving employment outcomes. More importantly, the strategy of ‘levelling up’ stresses that HE should focus on supporting people to contribute to economic growth and productivity.
The most prominent reason driving the focus on employability is the financial crisis that universities are facing, which makes universities dependent on employment outcomes to secure more funding. International students, rather than solely acting as customers, have been funding the universities as they are more often attracted to the selling point of employability, where graduate salaries may be used as a metric to assess course quality.
Not to be forgotten are societal expectations, which the statistics support, emphasising the importance of focusing on the employability that graduates expect. For example, graduates in the UK enjoy an 87.3% employment rate compared to 68.7% for non-graduates, with substantially higher rates of high-skilled employment—66.3% versus 23.6%, and median salaries—£38,500 versus £27,000.
What Else Beyond Employability?
However, it is worth emphasising that reducing higher education solely to an employability function risks overlooking its broader societal, cultural, and personal roles. I would argue that the highest purpose of higher education is to cultivate ‘critical thinking’ in individuals so that they can think independently, question assumptions, and engage meaningfully with the world around them. A sole focus on employability outcomes may undermine these transformative objectives.
Another important objective is that universities have a civic responsibility to nurture proactive and informed citizens, which means that such education can enable individuals to participate actively in their civic lives. HE courses in the humanities, social science and the arts are likely to nurture systems thinking and analytical thinking of societal issues, diversity, ethics, and social justice — competencies vital for democratic societies, and such skills are in demand in the global job market in the next five years, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Job Report published in 2025.
Higher ed may also serve a personal developmental purpose, empowering students to be curious and continue learning, providing the space for students to explore their passions, challenge their perspectives, and develop their branding. It may also empower students to think creatively through discussions and posing challenging questions that help individuals create a deeper connection with existing knowledge.
Most importantly, higher ed must continue to focus on knowledge creation, distribution, and high-quality research, as universities play a crucial role in advancing our knowledge in science, technology, and culture. Although this may not be directly linked to the job market and employability, universities can conduct and make relevant research available to practitioners, helping to address complex issues in industries.
Universities can put AI to work in this cause by developing AI assistants tailored to specific disciplines that may help analyse and solve complex issues across various industries. Rather than focusing on ‘stress-testing’ assessments and seeing using AI as a way to ‘cheat’, as the norm moving forward is that everyone should know how to use AI effectively and ethically to solve personal, workplace, and global systemic challenges, which should help improve everyone’s AI and big data literacy, one of the core skills required in 2030, within the industries collaboratively.
What’s Next?
The following steps shouldn’t be framed as an absolute choice between focusing on employability and other educational objectives. A more balanced, long-term systemic model of higher education may focus on both. Systems thinking, analytical thinking, and AI and big data literacy are only three of the core skills required in the workplace and global society next five years, which shows that the nature of employability itself is evolving rapidly, and universities need to redefine and align their graduate attributes to their courses more quickly and frequently to catch up with the ever-evolving non-linear careers as it is no longer about educating and training for any specific job.
