Lecture (No. 104): Higher Education and Employment
On April 19, 2017, Professor Ulrich Teichler from International Centre for Higher Education Research, University of Kassel, Germany delivered a lecture entitled “Higher Education and Employment” for IICE’s International Education Podium. The lecture was attended by graduate students, including international students from the IICE.
Professor Teichler discussed the relation between higher education and employment from multiple perspectives, including the basic recognized functions of higher education such as imparting academic knowledge, theories, and methodologies. Then he elaborated upon the relationship between employment and higher education emphasizing that public attention to the prominence of higher education in providing people with decent jobs and employment opportunities was mounting with the expansion of the higher education sector, which was especially true in developed nations.
With respect to the two distant ideas concerning higher education’s impact on employment, namely the expansion of higher education brings about high employment vs. such expansion disturbs the job markets, Professor Teichler used abundant data to analyze a number of European cases, and finally he pointed out that in the current context of higher education expansion worldwide, strengthening university-industry ties, enhancing quality of curricula and emphasizing praxis all served as prominent factors if a sound employment situation via higher education was to be achieved.
