UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN THE NEW LABOUR MARKET CONTEXT AMONG DEMAND LOGIC AND INSTITUTIONAL IDENTITY

Abstract

The development of educational experience organized at the Research canter and Highter Education Studies (CIEES) and the results of the research project. “University student´ quitting; the endogenous and exogenous factors in the academic curricular process” are a starting point for a reflection on the need to re-think the curricular organization of educational supply of higher education.

These affairs encompass a wide range of issues that must be analyzed: adequated to the university formation processes with a professional profile; the making things easy for students culture as well as the encouraging students not to make an effort versus hard work culture, the explication of new configuration of the in coming new student´s profile in relation of the labour demands, the incidence of the new labour scenario for the ´new vocation´ for short careers and for long distance careers (virtual one?). In short, the explication and redefining of the university function in the new educational demands. Students´ quitting issues constitute an axis of discussion about the sense of the university in society and it installs as well the preoccupation of its position, in a context whose dynamics challenges it to redefine itself permanently. A preoccupation that runs the risk of becoming an obsession to find the cause of student´ quitting, and for granting, in an excluding manner, the determining incidence and a decisive variable. Thus the conception of a multicausal and multidimensional process fades each one of its variables, acquires its own signification according to its particular interaction.

To assume this reality demands, on the one hand, to overcome the ingenuousness of not to acknowledge the implications of being left trapped in a demand market logic implication that may justify a university formation strictly laced in that logic, on the other hand to be warned about the wrong of the inside dynamics of an academic curricular process and the rules of the game of a political, economical and socio-cultural development historically contextualized.