532 Chapter 21 The Evolving Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education: The Rhetoric of Higher Education Reform Mary Runté University of Lethbridge Alberta, Canada Robert Runté University of Lethbridge Alberta, Canada ABSTRACT A brief historical overview of the evolution of the public discourse of the purpose of higher education is undertaken to provide context for current debates over investment in, and reform of, post-secondary education Four separate discourses are identified: higher education for enlightenment, to develop human capital, as manpower management, and as consumerism The dominant discourse of the purpose of higher education is shown to have changed from learning for its own sake to an emphasis on manpower planning and consumerism The separate assumptions and implications of these distinct discourses are often confabulated with little apparent awareness of the contradictory nature of rhetoric drawn from more than one discourse at a time The authors provide a simple analytical framework to cut through the confusion INTRODUCTION There is frequently a disconnect between research and public policy in the field of higher education (Hillman, Tandberg & Sponsler, 2015) Researchers need to ensure that their research is relevant to public policy, or risk speaking only to themselves By the same token, policy-makers need to ensure that decision-making is evidence-based or risk making costly mistakes based on faulty assumptions When addressing fundamental issues, both researchers and policy-makers start from the values and assumptions implicit within the dominant discourse(s) of the purpose of higher education Understanding how this public discourse has changed over time is, then, fundamental to any analysis of either research or policy trends DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-0672-0.ch021 Copyright © 2017, IGI Global Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited The Evolving Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education To be successful, educational leaders and administrators need to understand the assumptions that underlie the policies for which they are responsible This is surprisingly problematic because the arguments made to support investment in, or reform of, higher education often draw on four distinct (arguably contradictory) discourses As different discourses have historically appealed to different stakeholders, switching between discourses depending on the audience addressed is a sensible and workable strategy for administrators seeking support for their initiatives Problems arise, however, when these separate discourses become so confabulated that one is no longer able to disentangle them oneself Understanding discourse also abets predictability of changes in actual university practice Sustainable adoption of online courses, for example, can only be successful if relevant audiences can be convinced that the platform fits within the discourse of higher education Those institutions best able to predict how shifts in discourse will impact program models and delivery mechanisms will be first to market and therefore best able to capitalize on the emerging technologies The emergence of online institutions, for example, could be accurately predicted 35 years ago (Runté, 1981) —before there even was an Internet—through a simple extrapolation of the then emergent trends in the dominant discourse Therefore, it is impossible to understand shifts in government funding or public support for higher education without first understanding changes in the public discourse of the purpose of higher education This chapter traces the historical origins of the four competing discourses of the purpose of higher education to examine the fundamental assumptions that direct investment and reform FOUR DISCOURSES OF HIGHER EDUCATION The emergence of the modern university as a publicly funded institution was first predicated upon enlightenment ideals A discourse of education as investment in human capital then developed in competition to this ideal This human capital discourse was dominant during the explosive expansion of higher education in the post-war era, but became subject to further refinement the early 1980s The emergence of these two new discourses was predicated on the assumption that only targeted investment based on a measurable benefit to the economy justified expenditures from the public purse Categorized by their fundamental characteristics and presented in the order in which they became dominant, they are the discourses of enlightenment, human capital, manpower and consumerism The Discourse of Enlightenment The dominant discourse of the purpose of higher education initially was that any learning is of value in and of itself A significant proponent of this view was Cardinal Newman (1852), founder of Dublin University: “Knowledge is capable of being its own end Such is the constitution of the human mind that any kind of knowledge, if it really be such, is its own reward.” (p 130) Higher education, in the discourse of enlightenment, is not a means to some economic end, such as the attainment of professional qualifications or an assured supply of trained manpower, but an end in itself Opposed to this view was the insistence that education must be of some utility in the practical world Already in Newman’s time, these arguments were being expressed in terms almost indistinguishable from the present discourses of human capital and manpower planning To quote Cardinal Newman’s summary of the opposition: 533 The Evolving Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education What is the real worth in the market of the article called “a liberal education”, on the supposition that it does not teach us definitely how to advance our manufactures, or to improve our lands, or to better our civil economy; or again, if it does not at once make this man a lawyer, that an engineer, and that a surgeon; or at least if it does not lead to discoveries in chemistry, astronomy, geology, magnetism, and science of every kind (pp.171-172) Against this view of the practical end of education, the proponents of enlightenment argue that higher education—as opposed to mere training—was to develop the well-rounded individual, the ‘cultured gentleman’ In addition to a cultivated intellect, a disciplined and logical mind, the graduate was expected to possess a discerning taste, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of his life, a sense of responsibility to his society and civilization (Newman, p 144), and other attributes of what would today be termed the ‘self-actualized’ individual Higher education that was narrowly vocational could not provide this: Society itself requires some other contribution from each individual, besides the particular duties of his profession (Dr Copleston, quoted by Newman, p 184) And again: As a friend, as a companion, as a citizen at large; in the connections of domestic life; in the improvement and embellishment of his leisure, he has a sphere of action, revolving, if you please, with the sphere of his profession, but not clashing with it; in which if he can show none of the advantages of an improved understanding, whatever may be his skill or proficiency in the other, he is no more than an ill-educated man (Davidson, quoted by Newman, p 186) Thus, higher education in the discourse of enlightenment was not simply for professional training, but was expected to produce the intellectual, cultural, and ruling elite of the nation Of course, in this period universities were elite institutions, even when there was some provision made for the more promising sons of the ‘lower orders’ through scholarships and sponsored mobility A liberal education reflects the educational priorities of a landed aristocracy, where the accumulation of cultural capital was how one identified oneself as a member of the elite Higher education in the discourse of enlightenment was also necessarily perceived as representing consumption As an end in itself, education was by definition incapable of providing a direct economic return Professional and vocational training that had a demonstrable economic usefulness were on that account not considered part of liberal education Consequently, liberal studies undertaken for their own sake must necessarily represent consumption And since education was largely the preserve of the elite, it was a form of conspicuous consumption for the upper classes: one went to (private) universities because it was expected of gentlemen, not because it was required for economic advantage or determined one’s social status The benefits accruing from the establishment of universities were thought to be of a cultural rather than economic nature Universities, like opera houses and art galleries, were the result of economic growth and prosperity, not the cause The Discourse of Human Capital By the late 1950’s, however, this view of university as consumption was almost completely displaced by the discourse of human capital, which held that expenditures on education were an investment in human capital and the nation’s economic progress To quote Nobel laureate Theodore Schultz, best known of 534 The Evolving Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education human capital’s modern proponents, speaking on the benefits of education as an investment: “Much of what we call consumption constitutes investment in human capital Direct expenditures on education, health, and internal migration to take advantage of better job opportunities are clear examples (1977, p 313).” Viewed in this light, investment in education was as vital—and often a precondition for—investment in industry Investment in human capital, as with any other investment, could be expected to yield measurable economic return, and was no longer seen as simply personal consumption Human capital could be considered from two perspectives: that of the individual, and that of the state For the state, investment in human capital was a necessary prerequisite for economic progress and successful competition with other industrial nations For example, the first issue of University Affairs (October, 1959) published by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (now, Universities Canada), quoted Cyril James: The U.S.S.R is putting a tremendous amount of money and effort into education because it realizes that trained men—not natural resources—are the foundation of national prosperity and essential for continuing economic growth In the world in which we live more people with a good education are required for national progress, and if we in Canada want to maintain our prosperity and our welfare we too must find ways to see that the brightest of our youngsters are encouraged and enabled to get all of the education of which they are capable Similarly, it was often argued, throughout this period, that Third World nations were underdeveloped primarily due to widespread illiteracy and a disastrous lack of graduates Post-war Europe, for example, was said to have had fewer intact capital resources than many African nations, but the recovery of the European economies proceeded at a much more rapid pace than did the development of the African states The differences in human capital, particularly in terms of education, seemed to account for this Thus, the discourse of human capital was adopted by such agencies as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, and was exported throughout the world as the basis for most of the development strategies and policies of the 1950s and 1960s (Schultz, p 322; and Karabel & Halsey, pp 13-15) From the individual’s point of view, staying in high school, working one’s way through college (or other forms of post-secondary training) represented an investment in the individual’s own earning capacities A medical student, for example, would be prepared to undertake a long and costly course of studies only in anticipation of realizing substantial return on this investment upon entering the medical profession Even here, however, the state may expect to receive an indirect benefit in that the higher wages realized by the trained worker imply higher tax revenues as well Karabel and Halsey also make the interesting observation that: what must be further remarked about the theory of human capital is the direct appeal to pro-capitalist ideological sentiment that resides in its insistence that the worker is a holder of capital—(as embodied in his skills and knowledge) and that he has the capacity to invest (in himself) Thus in a single bold conceptual stroke, the wage earner, who holds no property and controls neither the process nor the product of his labour, is transformed into a capitalist (p 13) 535 The Evolving Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education In any event, the discourse of human capital was generally thought to account for the obvious correlation between years of education and salaries, and students were encouraged to continue their education as an investment in their future, and to regard a university degree as the key to all opportunity Thus the discourse encouraged the demand for high school completion and university on the part of students (and their parents) at the same time that it urged governments to meet this demand In Canada, for example, the precepts of human capital theory were popularized by the Economic Council of Canada, which tended to emphasize the need to expand public schooling, higher education and university-based research to catch up with the United States which had demonstrated higher completion rates of high school and university: “In Canada relatively more resources have been put into capital facilities, while in the United States relatively more resources have been put into the development of a more highly educated labour force and into the development and application of new technology…” (ECC, 1966, p 13) As a result of this perceived failure to keep pace with the United States, the Council concluded that “ the shortage of skilled and trained technical, professional and managerial manpower is even more critical than the problem of enlarging the physical facilities required for output” (p 13) and recommended “tremendous expansion” of enrollment rates and creation of infrastructure at university and technical school to create a “sharply accelerating flow of professional and other highly skilled manpower (p 13).” The following year John Deutsch of the Economic Council of Canada announced that: In its studies the Council has found the rate of return from investment in education, both to the individual and the economy as a whole, is at least as large, and probably larger than, almost any other form of investment This has led us to recommend that the advancement of education and training at all levels in Canada be given a very high place in the public policy and that investment in education be accorded first place in the scale of priorities Naturally enough, Canadian educators were not slow to adopt a discourse of human capital themselves, given the immediate benefit to their universities in terms of funding and prioritization The highly influential Bladen Commission’s report on Financing Higher Education In Canada (1967) said reinforced the Economic Council’s conclusion and charged government with creating the demand to fulfill this mandate: “The people demand it; our economic growth requires it; our governments must take the action necessary to implement it (p.1).” The human capital discourse thus became the theoretical basis upon which the explosive expansion of public schooling and higher education in Canada and elsewhere was justified This discourse remained practically unchallenged throughout the 1960s, with its only opposition coming from a few traditionalists who reacted against what they perceived as the dehumanizing human capital approach and argued the enlightenment discourse’s view that the university’s mission was intellectual and cultural, not economic Steacie (1960), for example, stated that: Education should be considered as a Canadian problem and not as a race with anyone Most emphatically, Canadian university graduates should not be considered mere units of military armament In fact it cannot be emphasized too strongly that the whole manpower concept is quite foreign to the real purpose of a university (p.5) 536 The Evolving Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education Most educators, however, argued that the emphasis on the economic benefits of this expansion was in no way inconsistent with the university’s intellectual and cultural functions: “The assumption—and I think it is a fair one—is simply that to fulfill its social and cultural functions a system of education must first of all be economically efficient (Aird, 1967, p.6).” By the early 1970s, however, the theory of human capital was under attack in terms both of its basic assumptions and its specific policy recommendations Writers such as Lester Thurow and Barry Bluestone questioned the discourse’s contention that employment status and wage rates could be explained simply on the basis of variations in human capital Bluestone contends that the correlation between education and income, such as the contrast in salaries between physician and janitor, was on the surface reasonable This correlation, however was extrapolated to all labour research and ultimately was used to support the contention that one’s economic situation was a matter of personal choice: “Those who invested more in themselves would (almost automatically) find employment more often, reap higher wages, and benefit from greater economic security (1977, p.337).” Government response to social issues, such as poverty, were directed towards educational programs almost exclusively as “a technical exercise of finding the right combination of manpower programs or human-resource development schemes to lift each individual from personal disadvantage (p 338)” whilst ignoring crises such as systemic discrimination as a root cause: But many of those who suffer from low wages and unemployment have a considerable amount of human capital They fail to find jobs that pay a living wage because of racism, sexism, economic depression, and uneven development of industries and regions Compared with some workers who have found steady employment in high-wage industries, these workers have, in many cases, even more human capital, but happen to be the wrong color or sex, to be too young or too old, or to live on the wrong side of town or in the wrong part of the country The inadequacy of the economic system is a more important cause of poverty than the inadequacy of people (p.338) The failure of the American “War on Poverty”, which was premised largely on a discourse of human capital, would seem to support Bluestone’s contention that “ the human-capital school has attempted to immunize the patient when it should have been eradicating the disease (p 338).” Once it was demonstrated that investment in human capital was not sufficient to ensure either personal advancement or the eradication of poverty, the increasing investment in public schools, the creation of community colleges (which were explicitly the agency for educational investment in the lower classes and minority groups), and the expansion of the university system ceased to be seen as a panacea for all of society’s ills The major reaction against the discourse of human capital, however, came as a result of increasing graduate unemployment (or underemployment), decreasing enrolments, and spiraling costs, all of which seemed to indicate that the limits of expansion had been reached, especially in the post-secondary system Although the model had postulated that investment in human capital inevitably resulted in economic growth—probably equal to or even in excess of the scale of the investment—this was not, in fact, happening The Canadian economy, for example, was experiencing recession, high unemployment, and inflation Instead of the predicted phenomenon of an expanding economy absorbing an expanding graduate class, the economy was being over-supplied with expensive, over-trained manpower This in turn led to a falling off of enrolments as the public realized that personal investment in higher education, both in terms of the direct costs and in foregone earnings, might not provide an adequate return (From time to time the trend has reversed, as those who cannot find suitable employment seek refuge 537 The Evolving Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education from unfavourable labour markets by enrolling in further education Although most of these individuals retain some hope that the additional skills gained may increase their marketability, further schooling has generally been seen as viable only in contrast to the bleak hopes of finding wage employment during periods of high unemployment.) The increasing public disillusionment with undergraduate education especially was also reflected in a growing resentment for the rising cost of university education to the taxpayer, and a subsequent reordering of priorities by governments The unlimited investment in higher education that had been premised on a discourse of human capital came to an abrupt end Some writers, such as Alexander Lockhart, concluded that the discourse of human capital had never been appropriate, arguing that distinctions between Canada and the US economic systems and industrial priorities made the importation of the discourse to Canadian soil both unsuccessful and undesirable: At the time (1965), the principle areas of human capital shortage in the US economy were in the aerospace, electronic components, and other industries dependent upon public contract and subsidy which in turn were part of the function of America’s role as a world power Clearly, Canada has no such potential, as illustrated by the Government’s foreclosure of the ‘Arrow’, all-Canadian fighter aircraft, and the subsequent collapse of the Canadian aircraft industry To have imported uncritically a theoretical discourse designed to meet the manpower goals reflected the American reality would thus seem illogical in the extreme (p 252) Lockhart provided a convincing analysis of the errors of the Economic Council of Canada’s assumption throughout the 1960s that the demand for highly trained manpower in Canada was outstripping supply, and he also questioned the presumed economic benefits of university expansion in Canada on the scale experienced in the United States He pointed out that Sweden had achieved a higher level of industrialization and a slightly better standard of living than had Canada during the 1960s, but with only half the number of graduates The Economic Council of Canada was itself expressing reservations about the costs of unrestrained investment and expansion of higher education as early as 1970 The focus of its reports showed a shift away from the discourse of human capital and the concomitant emphasis on the necessity for investment in education to one on the need for greater efficiency, cost effectiveness, co-ordination to reduce duplication, and a general need to reduce costs The Council’s 1971 publication, Canadian Higher Education In The Seventies, for example, included a series of articles re-stressing the consumption view of education, particularly for purposes of predicting future enrolments Educators and administrators who had come to expect the unqualified support of economists in their bid for a larger share of the GNP, suddenly found their former allies urging accountability and even cutbacks To quote J F Leddy, then President of the University of Windsor: Yet, in spite of this swing in the pendulum, Canadian Universities have not changed during the last five years in their performance and in their genuine importance to Canada All that has happened is that those who begin and end their superficial case for the university with economic and materialistic considerations only, now find that, if they can ride smoothly upward with favourable arguments provided by the Economic Council of Canada in a given year, they must be prepared to plunge on down the slope of the roller coaster a few years later in a time of depression (1971, p.5) 538 The Evolving Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education Similarly, in the United States there were a series of reports throughout the 1980s—for example, A Nation At Risk, Action for Excellence, Making the Grade and Educating Americans for the 21st Century—attacking the schools for their failure to deliver on their promises of economic and social returns on investment America was losing its competitive standing in the world, it was claimed, because Soviet school children took four years of science and two of calculus, whereas 50% of Americans had no science or math past grade 10 To quote Governor James B Hunt (Chair of the Task Force on Education for Economic Growth), “We Americans want to insure that we can continue to compete in the world economy We want our economic productivity increased, our technological capability enhanced and our standing in the world restored” (1984, p 539) These reports therefore called for greater corporate input into increasingly standardized curriculum, increasing math and science requirements, tightening graduation standards, and eliminating ‘unnecessary frills’—i.e., the seemingly non-vocational liberal arts Art, music and drama classes became obvious targets as the emphasis was increasingly placed on job training, which in the view of these reports meant a greater emphasis on math and science The business sector came in for criticism for not being sufficiently involved in determining curriculum: “We must tell the business community that, if it wants better employees and higher profits, it must be involved in what the schools teach and how they teach it (Hunt, 1984, p 540).” None of these reports offered any concrete evidence that their recommended changes would in fact improve economic performance; it was simply assumed Critics like Joel Spring (1984) quickly pointed out that lower American productivity was unrelated to schooling, but the result of the questionable short-term strategies of American business leaders who had opted to exploit the worker surplus created by the babyboom to employ cheap labour, rather than invest in expensive machinery As babyboomers flooded the American labour market in the 1960s and 1970s, entry-level salaries sharply decreased, making hiring cheap labour the attractive alternative to investment in infrastructure; and government became obsessed with vocational training in the (largely mistaken) belief that youth unemployment was caused by a lack of skills (rather than simple babyboom demographics) As cheap, trained labour became increasingly available, productivity necessarily went down, because productivity is defined as output per worker hour In contrast, labour-starved post-war Japan became the world leader in robotics because it was the only possible response to that nation’s labour shortages Japanese productivity went up because there were relatively fewer workers available/required to supervise their increasingly mechanized factories, while American productivity went down because their factories relied instead on armies of babyboomers Thus, the higher productivity of Japanese workers related to the higher degree of mechanization of Japanese production compared to American business, and was largely unrelated to the trumpeted differences in their educational systems As the babyboom petered out in the West, the oversupply of entry-level labour correspondingly dried up, threatening to drive up salaries; as employed babyboomers aged, so did their expectation for higher wages to reflect their lengthening seniority As workers thus became significantly more expensive, American business leaders abruptly became preoccupied with worker productivity and blamed the schools (rather than their own short-sightedness) for the economy’s shortcomings (Spring, 1984) The calls for educational reform therefore shifted to a focus on the need for higher standards, more science and math, and greater technological literacy in the hopes that these now more expensive workers could be made correspondingly more productive The continued calls for expansion of skills training at every level, and for greater efforts to ensure the schooling of marginalized populations (women, minorities, etc.) may have resonated with the public, but the more cynical may notice that such measures also had the effect of shoring up the then dwindling numbers of entry level workers By replacing babyboomers 539 The Evolving Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education with formerly excluded or marginalized populations, the continued expansion of skill training had the effect of increasing the reserve army of the un- and under-employed, thereby driving wages back down Spring and others therefore pointed out that responding to the short term interests of the business sector may not be in the best public interest, as these policies would result in lower wages, not the higher incomes promised by the discourse of human capital; that in effect, the education system was being used to exploit workers (Spring, 1984) The Discourse of Manpower Nevertheless, there was no returning to the enlightenment discourse Criticism of the human capital discourse was generally directed at specific details and recommendations, rather than to the basic premise that expenditure in higher education represents investment For example, Lockhart’s critique focused on the applicability of a particular recommendation, that of the development of Ph.D programs in science, to the particular Canadian context Although he succeeded in demonstrating the illogic of that policy being adopted in Canada—and by extension, the discourse’s contention that economic growth inevitably follows any investment in human capital—he did not question that people represent an economic resource that requires investment, or that the function of education is primarily vocational In other words, rather than a complete rejection of the discourse of human capital in favour of a discourse of enlightenment, all that happened was that investment in human capital was demoted from a ‘necessary and sufficient’ factor for economic growth to a ‘necessary but not sufficient’ factor Similarly, certain other assumptions, such as the assertion that the labour market is freely competitive, were dropped or refined; but these changes represent the emergence of a new discourse, rather than a return to a discourse of enlightenment This new version of the human capital model may be seen as a discourse of manpower planning This manpower-based discourse is similar to the human capital model with this essential difference: whereas the discourse of human capital viewed the development of any level of schooling as investment in economic growth through the creation of new human capital, the manpower discourse is more narrowly interpreted to recommend investment in only those programs for which there is a demonstrable demand for its graduates in the labour market In other words, investment based on a discourse of manpower training is determined by the specific manpower requirements of the economy, rather than premised on the development of the economy through a general rise in the population’s level of education Whereas the discourse of human capital viewed public education as a prerequisite for the development of the nation’s industries, the more refined discourse of manpower considers schools and universities as a national industry, where investment can be made on the basis of such criteria as the usefulness of the product (both in terms of graduates and research), efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and so on, just like any other public corporation In some ways, the emergence of a discourse of manpower needs represents a further movement away from the discourse of enlightenment The enlightenment discourse emphasized that any learning was worthwhile for its own sake; the human capital discourse similarly accepted that any learning was an investment in human capital; but the manpower discourse rejects any learning in favour of specific, vocationally and economically useful learning Thus, for example, the enlightenment discourse favoured a liberal arts program as the best approach to general intellectual development; and the human capital discourse accepted liberal studies as a useful investment in generalized skills; but proponents of the discourse of manpower needs regard liberal studies with great skepticism, as its direct economic and 540 The Evolving Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education vocational relevance is difficult to demonstrate Under a manpower-centered discourse, then, one would expect a trend towards an even greater vocationalization of higher education than with a discourse of human capital This was certainly the case elsewhere To take Singapore as just one example, Ashton and Sung (1997) noted that the government directly manipulated the education system to ensure that graduates closely matched projected manpower needs .to make Singapore a regional center for certain of the knowledge-based industries, the government decided that it requires not just a significant portion of the population to move through higher education but, crucially, that the system must produce the requisite number of scientists and engineers to provide the level of research and development required to sustain such industries In this situation education can never be allowed the kind of autonomy it has experienced in the West, but will always need to be subordinated to the needs of nation-building and especially of economic development (p.217) Western governments could shift the dominant discourse towards one of manpower planning, but were unprepared to be seen to be limiting educational opportunity for voters’ children, or too blatantly assaulting university autonomy Governments could therefore only manipulate universities indirectly through pairing general cutbacks with specific financial incentives In Alberta, for example, funding for higher education was divided into ‘base funding’ (ongoing grants) and ‘funding envelopes’ which made additional funding available for specific programs favoured by the government’s economic planners Coping with generalized cutbacks (or just the failure to keep up with inflation, capital costs, and so on) on the one hand, and significant grants for targeted programs on the other, post-secondary institutions generally allowed themselves to be shaped by government economic policies, without the need for direct government edict Similarly, since government investment in education is premised upon the manpower needs of the economy, there is a strong desire on the part of government to assess students for the cost of that portion of their education which is of private benefit; that is, which represents individual consumption For example, in a report prepared by John Buttrick for the Ontario Economic Council (February 1978), the recommendation was made that university tuition fees be allowed to rise to the point where they covered nearly the full cost of teaching: “I find the case for subsidization of post-secondary education to be very weak, except for research and public service components p 10).” The manpower model of education remains a dominant discourse In India, for example, Delhi University recently shifted to a four-year undergraduate model, arguing that they were “not turning out employable graduates…We have not touched the knowledge component but added other values such as communication, applied language, information technology, basic mathematics and other skills that each graduate must have to be employable (emphasis added, Vice-chancellor Professor Singh, as quoted by Mishra, 2014).” The relationship between these first three discourses may be seen in Table Movement from left to right represents four associated trends: (1) a shift from an emphasis on the needs of the individual to the needs of the economy; (2) a shift in the cost burden from the individual to the society; (3) a shift in control from the universities to governments; and (4) a transition in scale from elite to mass institutions Each of these parallel developments is interdependent, as it is unlikely that any of them could have emerged without the others 541 The Evolving Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education Table 1: Discourses of higher education Enlightenment Discourse Human Capital Discourse Manpower Discourse Needs of individual given priority Needs of individual seen as converging with needs of society Societal needs given priority Costs borne by the individual (consumption) Costs shared by the individual and the society (investment) Cost borne by the public (investment) Schools private; universities autonomous Public schools; universities autonomous within provincial or state system Public schools; Universities controlled by governments; Schools/colleges elite institutions Schools and universitites becomes mass institutions Multiversities part of universal postsecondary system Note: The above represent ‘ideal types’ and may not exist in pure form Even under the manpower discourse, however, there is usually some (implicit) acknowledgement that there are a few indirect benefits that presumably result from having a culturally literate populace For example, a region without sufficient educational opportunities might experience difficulty in attracting or retaining the best corporate managers for their industries, as these people would desire good schools for their children; yet such variables are not easy to recognize, let alone measure When such indirect benefits are acknowledged, however, they are generally seen as being outside the economic sphere To the extent that a liberal arts orientation functions to educate students rather than to provide specific vocational training (or industry related research), universities and colleges are perceived as cultural institutions on a par with public libraries, museums, art galleries, and sports arenas In other words, post-secondary education is the product of economic prosperity, rather than a contributing factor The Discourse of Consumerism This refinement of the human capital discourse into the manpower discourse led to a corresponding refinement of the enlightenment discourse into a discourse of consumerism Under the manpower discourse, universities were encouraged to see their main function as vocational preparation, and the needs of the economy are placed ahead of those of the individual Courses and programs that offer the student opportunities for self-actualization outside the vocational context were shunted off the main campuses to a new type of facility These new institutions, the open universities, marketed university-level education to adults who were, by and large, already participating in the economy They catered to part-time students who undertook study in their own homes as a leisure activity In England, for example, the Open University originally catered to teachers seeking to upgrade their diplomas to degrees (but who would presumably remain in their current positions as teachers upon graduation), housewives (who would likely remain housewives), retired workers (who were by definition not relevant to manpower considerations) and an assortment of others seeking to “improve themselves.” Relatively few seemed to sign up for courses in the hopes of improving their marketable skills The first such institution in Canada was Athabasca University in the province of Alberta At first glance, 1970s Alberta would appear to be the last place on Earth one would have expected a consumeroriented, open-admissions, distance-education university to emerge, given the province’s neoconservative government, elected on a platform of spending cutbacks (Runté, 1981) Closer examination reveals 542 The Evolving Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education that Athabasca University had been originally intended as a residential liberal arts institution to be located in a suburb of Edmonton, the provincial capital, to absorb the overflow from the University of Alberta, when the latter institution had been unable to expand sufficiently rapidly during the late 1960s to accommodate student (i.e., voter-parent) demand Before it could be built, however, the Progressive Conservative party won the 1971 provincial elections on a platform that explicitly rejected the discourse of human capital espoused by the previous governing party, in favour of an agenda of spending cuts and carefully targeted investment in higher education General university funding was cut or held below the rate of inflation, while special funds were made available to schools of Management and other vocational programs favoured by the new government Consequently, Athabasca University was immediately demoted from a residential liberal arts university to a correspondence institution styled closely on England’s Open University (Alberta Advanced Education and Manpower, 1975) Not only was a correspondence university considerably less expensive for the government to finance, it served the purpose of meeting consumer demand for more university places without overproducing over qualified workers Only 40% of students registering with Athabasca University cited career reasons for doing so (1979/80 AU Calendar) The majority of students cited either educational or personal reasons: that is, they were seeking either a degree, or some form of self-fulfillment In either event, the pursuit of liberal studies was perceived by both the individual and the state as a consumer activity, rather than primarily as an investment That Athabasca University was the first university in Canada to accept payment by credit card is perhaps indicative of its consumer orientation (Runté, 1981) Critics pointed out that the primary purpose of Athabasca University was to facilitate cutbacks to universal access to state-subsidized liberal arts education through the established campuses; as entrance standards were arbitrarily raised and enrolments in liberal arts faculties constrained at the University of Alberta and University of Calgary (Alberta’s two major provincial institutions), demand for increased access from students (and their voter parents) was deflected by offering open access to Athabasca University (Runté, 1981) Athabasca’s correspondence delivery model was not only much cheaper for the state, it charged students a higher proportion of the actual costs of their courses, and left the majority of students as full-time workers, fully participating in the labour market as they completed correspondence work at night and on weekends By offering this consumer-oriented liberal arts option, the province was able to shift the growth of established universities to more vocationally-oriented faculties (Runté, 1981) The consumerism discourse is even more clearly seen in the field of adult education To take just one example, by the 1970s the Edmonton Journal was publishing a twice-yearly “Education Supplement” listing a host of evening and weekend classes offered by Public and Separate School Boards, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, Grant MacEwan Community College (now University), Athabasca University, and the Department of Extension of the University of Alberta Not only did this represent a vast choice of courses (and of class times, locations, instructors, levels of difficulty, and costs) from which the potential student could choose, but also represented the emergence of a mass market, mass media level of curriculums Instead of courses in Latin or classical Greek, one found belly-dancing lessons, ski classes, pottery courses, and cooking lessons, all of which would have been unthinkable under a discourse of enlightenment, which necessarily focused on the ‘high culture’ of educated elites, rather than the popular culture of the masses Of course, there were also a good many more ‘serious’ courses offered as well, some of which might even have been of vocational relevance, but the emphasis was always on providing the student with the knowledge and skills that the student requested, rather than training the pupil to the intellectual standard assumed within the discourse of enlightenment or to satisfy a particular need in the labour market 543 The Evolving Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education All that was before the emergence of the Internet and online courses Today, of course, the options available to consumers are practically unlimited The phrase “online courses” brings up about 997,000,000 results on Google, 56,000,000 on Bing; even allowing for the inevitable mistaken and duplicate entries, it is obvious that essentially any knowledge appropriate to higher education is today available to consumers as a course online (Readers are challenged to identify a topic that cannot be found as part of an online course.) Thus one sees the increasing emergence of educational institutions that are largely autonomous, give priority to the needs of the individual, and often charge the student the full cost of education, as under the discourse of enlightenment, but which are nevertheless mass rather than elite institutions Whereas the discourse of enlightenment included both the concept of the ‘cloistered scholar’ and an absolute standard against which the ‘educated gentleman’ was measured, neither is to be found in the cafeteria-style offerings and part-time, at-home study of recreational education The new discourse of consumerism is therefore distinct from the enlightenment discourse UNTANGLING CONFABULATED DISCOURSES The long history of debate over the purpose of higher education continues uninterrupted, with important practical implications for educational leaders and administrators To take just one recent (2015) attempt to unravel these competing discourses, Appiahsept distinguishes between “Utility” and “Utopia” and explains how these competing orientations impact tenure, campus culture, civility, and so on Under the Utopian (i.e., Enlightenment) discourse, for example, tenure serves to ensure research free from outside influence; whereas under the Utility (i.e., Manpower) discourse, tenure is perceived as a barrier to program flexibility and efficiency, and gives rise to a corresponding emphasis on instructor accountability (Appiahsept) It is therefore crucial that one understands how these discourses relate to one another in order to tease out their implications for program funding and reform The relationship of these four discourses may be seen in Figure The enlightenment discourse and the consumerism discourse both portray schooling as intrinsically valuable regardless of vocational relevance, in contrast to the human capital and manpower discourses which both depict higher education as a means of social and economic development Both the human capital and consumerism discourses see higher education as input determined, with universities responding to the demands and market choices of students Both the manpower and enlightenment discourses see schooling as ‘output determined’, with both public schooling and post-secondary institutions responding to the needs of the labour market and the economy in the former, and to the intellectual standards of the ‘cultured gentleman’ in the latter It should be emphasized, however, that these four discourses are not entirely mutually exclusive Colleges often offer a multitude of programs that effectively stream students based on perceived ability (i.e., cultural capital) and career aspiration Universities often house a multitude of faculties and programs, some of which will be focused strictly on intellectual training, while others emphasize vocational or professional preparation Most post-secondary institutions, for example, provide facilities for outreach and consumer education beside their regular mandates Vocationally oriented post-secondary institutions will often require students to take courses not directly related to vocational skills because they are felt to be of general intellectual benefit (e.g., ‘Engineer English’) Often a single course or program can be seen to draw upon both the manpower and consumerism discourses as some students register for career reasons while others take courses purely for personal satisfaction 544 The Evolving Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education For example, in its Mandate Statement (Undergraduate Calendar, 2015-16), the University of Lethbridge distinguishes itself from other Alberta universities as “founded on the principles of a liberal education” (p.6) One would therefore anticipate a discourse of enlightenment to dominate, and there are indeed references to the development of the intellectual rigour and civic-mindedness of the cultured individual: “[ours is] the university in Alberta that empowers individuals with broader knowledge and prepares them to think critically and creatively, communicate clearly, solve complex problems, and contribute fully to society (p.7).” Statements such as “We are committed to the individual student as a person of ultimate worth (p.7)” reflect the emphasis within the enlightenment discourse on the needs of the individual On the other hand, even within the opening paragraph of the Mandate Statement there are references to “certificate programs that lead to professional specialization (p.6) (manpower orientation) and “open studies for lifelong learners (p.6)” (consumerism) Elsewhere in the Calendar we discover the introduction of market modifiers (p.59) wherein management students are charged higher tuition fees than students from other faculties, even when enrolled in the exact same courses Such a policy reflects the human capital assumption that a management degree will provide a higher return on investment for that individual, than for graduates who took the same course(s) as part of a Fine Arts or Arts and Science degree, and therefore the management student will be prepared to accept such market modifiers CONCLUSION Understanding the shift from the enlightenment discourse to the manpower and consumerism discourses places much of the current criticism of post-secondary education into clearer perspective Having promised under the tenants of the human capital discourse to solve unemployment, poverty, racism, sexism, and essentially all other social ills, it is hardly surprising that institutions of higher education now come into criticism for having failed to deliver The emphasis on accountability, high standards, ‘relevant’ curricula, and so on, are attempts to make the ongoing investment in higher education finally pay off Having once invited the business sector into discussions of which skills and knowledge would be relevant to their manpower needs, as part of schooling’s promise to further economic development, we cannot now complain that curriculum is being designed by lobbyists rather than educators If the public looks to education to cure every social ill from poverty to gender discrimination to Isis recruitment, it is because the public uncritically adopted a discourse that justifies educational funding on the basis of its social returns on investment Educational leaders need to understand that higher education is not a panacea and cannot in fact address every emergent social need; and that attempting to so often makes university complicit in deflecting attention from the real sources of the problem Blacks or indigenous peoples are not unemployed because they lack requisite skills, but because racism ensures they are the last hired and the first laid off; the economy faltered in 2008 because American bankers took fraudulent advantage of deregulation—and because capitalist economies go through cycles—not because post-secondary institutions did not graduate the right mix of manpower Educational administrators need to understand that these four discourses have become ideologies that influence public opinion, and that the rhetoric of the earlier discourses is often still used to gain public support for a neoconservative or corporate agenda Educational leaders need to tease out these underlying assumptions and contradictions, as lobbyists reference the enlightenment discourse’s insistence on high standards to introduce vocationalized curricula that displace critical thinking with trained incapacity—that is, such strenuous training in technique that it undermines one’s ability to question goals (Merton, 1957, 545 The Evolving Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education Runté & Runté, 2007); or reference the human capital discourse’s promise of a better life for graduates to advocate for an expansion of skills training, when the ultimate outcome of such expansion is more likely to be lower wages Identifying and critiquing these contradictions is the first step in effectively resisting these so-called reforms For example, corporate leaders like to claim that they are outsourcing jobs or hiring foreign workers because Canadian workers lack the necessary skills, when what they really mean is that there are no Canadians with those skills willing to work for the wages they are offering The importation of Chinese minors to work a coalmine in British Columbia (Canada) is a clear example (Stueck) Claiming a lack of skilled workers blames the post-secondary system for failing to adopt relevant curricula, and blames workers for not having invested in the training for which corporate leaders are no longer willing to pay Advocating for expansion of skills training in the school/post-secondary system transfers the responsibility for training costs from corporations to the individual worker and to the public purse Students now pay tuition and forego wages, often assuming massive debt, for training they would once have been paid to obtain on the job Yet there is little in the public discourse that asks why taxpayers are being asked to subsidize training for the private profit of corporations Far from the promise of better employment for graduates, in the long run, expanded public-subsidized skills training significantly lowers wages by expanding the pool of available skilled workers competing for the same jobs Educators need, therefore, to be able to separate the rhetoric from the reality, and to identify these obfuscations and contradictions to the public They need to be completely clear on what exactly they believe to be the true purpose of education, and how this should be accomplished, before stepping into the arena of public discourse REFERENCES Aird, H J (1967, December) University Affairs, 9, Alberta Advanced Education and Manpower (1975) Athabasca University: A proposed role and mandate Edmonton, Alberta: Queen’s Printer Appiahsept, K A (2015, September 13) The college crossroads New York Times Sunday Magazine, MM17 Ashton, D., & Sung, J (1997) Education, skill formation, and 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