Promoting the relevance of higher education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objective and structure of the study Europe's knowledge economies need high-level skills, the capacity to innovate and to support democratic societies.In this perspective, the main objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the relevance of higher education and how this is promoted in various countries in Europe and beyond.The evidence, conclusions and recommendations are intended to support EU Member States in developing and improving policies that promote the relevance of higher education: for students; for graduates; for employers; and for society.On the basis of a review of relevant literature, policy documents and databases, consultation with national experts and eight in-depth country case studies (Canada [Ontario], the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain) that included interviews with many national stakeholders, this study seeks to answer the following questions: How is the relevance of higher education defined in different member states? Which policy levers do member states use to promote higher education relevance? Which national policies concerning higher education relevance appear to be effective and good practice examples? Which indicators are informative in assessing higher education relevance at system level? How can an analytic and diagnostic tool be designed and developed that can provide a systematic assessment of the relevance of higher education systems? Key findings Higher education is relevant when it contributes to personal development, sustainable employment and active citizenshipRelevance is understood differently by different stakeholders in higher education.These understandings can refer to the competencies of individual students as well as to their collective outcomes for society.To analyse national policies concerning higher education relevance, and indicators to measure this relevance, we adopted the three main objectives of higher education formulated by the Council of Europe ( 2007): personal development, sustainable employment and active citizenship.Personal development relates to individual growth at the psychological, cognitive, social and moral levels.In terms of sustainable employment, higher education provides students with the skills to secure and sustain suitable employment.Active citizenship encompasses the development of (inter)cultural skills, a sense of citizenship, and political literacy and participation.In addition, higher education relevance relates to different "users" of higher education: students, graduates, employers and society.Countries differ in the priorities they give to the three higher education relevance dimensions and the different higher education user groups.Sustainable employment receives the most explicit attention, primarily as a result of the increasing emphasis on the contribution of higher education to the knowledge economy and because it is arguably easier to measure than personal development and active citizenship.The latter two dimensions are addressed more implicitly in most countries as they are assumed to be embedded in higher education practice.Compared to most other studies, this report broadens the concept of relevance beyond employability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".