University Education in the New Labor Market Context: Between Demand-Driven Logic and Institutional Identity

Abstract

The development of educational experiences organized by the Center for Research and Studies in Higher Education (CIEES), together with the results of the research project “University Student Attrition: The Incidence of Endogenous and Exogenous Factors in the Academic-Curricular Process”, provides the starting point for a reflection on the need to rethink the curricular organization of higher education offerings.

These issues encompass a wide range of problems that require analysis: the adequacy of university training processes in relation to the professional profile; the culture of ease and least effort versus the culture of work; the explicit definition of the new configuration of the entering student’s profile in connection with labor demands; and the incidence of the new labor scenario on the “new vocation” for short-cycle and distance degree programs, perhaps virtual ones. In short, they call for the clarification and redefinition of the university’s function within the framework of new educational demands.

The problem of student attrition constitutes the axis of the discussion about the meaning of the university institution in society and raises concern about its positioning in a context whose dynamics challenge it to redefine itself permanently. This concern entails the risk of becoming an obsession with finding “the cause of attrition” and with granting a single variable exclusive, determining, and decisive incidence. In this way, the conception of a multicausal and multidimensional process is blurred, although each variable acquires its own significance according to its particular interaction with the others.

Assuming this reality requires, on the one hand, overcoming the naivety of ignoring the implications of becoming trapped in the demands of a market logic that justifies a university education constrained by that logic. On the other hand, it requires recognizing the mismatches between the internal dynamics of an academic-curricular process and the rules of the game of a historically contextualized political, economic, and sociocultural development.