A higher education system that is increasingly becoming obsessed with vocational outcomes is “neither just nor efficient”, a government adviser on skills has warned.
Baroness Wolf said such a shift was “incredibly one-dimensional” and that apprenticeships need to be revived as a genuine alternative in the UK.
Lady Wolf, the Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of public sector management at King’s College London, and an adviser to the UK government on levelling up and skills policy, outlined what she called the “paradox of vocational education” in an address at the London School of Economics on 7 December.
“Higher education is increasingly seen either in terms of its immediate contribution to people’s wages in the labour market today, or, in the case of research, in terms of longer-term benefits to society,” she said.
