Countries and Regions

NUMBER 54, WINTER 2009

Higher Education and the Wayward Labor Market

Wietse de Vries, Alberto Cabrera, and Shaquana Anderson
Wietse de Vries is professor of educational management and Vicerrectoria de Docencia, Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, Av. Juan de Palafox y Mendoza 219, 72000 Puebla, Puebla, Mexico. E-mail: cs000803@siu.buap.mx. Alberto F. Cabrera is professor in the Department of Education Leadership, Higher Education and International Education, University of Maryland, 2205 Benjamin Bldg., College Park, MD 20742, USA. E-mail: cabrera@umd.edu. Shaquana Anderson is a graduate assistant in the Department of Education Leadership, Higher Education and International Education, University of Maryland, 2205 Benjamin Blg., College Park, MD 20742, USA. E-mail: sanders7@umd.edu.

Sometimes the labor market for university graduates seems unwilling to comply with predictions, most of all those launched by policymakers. In a recent alumni study by the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, in Mexico, traditional majors were found better suited to local labor demands than novel options. Traditional majors showed higher levels of employment and job satisfaction. Alumni from these majors also indicated higher levels of congruence between work and education.

These findings run contrary to at least two decades of public policies—not only in Mexico, but throughout Latin America. Beginning in the 1990s, policymakers and institutional managers, inspired by reports from international organizations including the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, began diversifying major offerings based on the notion that traditional options were ill-suited for the demands of the new knowledge-based society. These policies were mostly based on predictions for future regional economies. Students were advised, encouraged, and sometimes pressed to avoid majors such as law, accountancy, administration, medicine, or civil engineering, and to opt for promising novel options like nanotechnology, tourism, environmental engineering, or design.

However, these policies have been mostly based on assumptions on what could or should be happening in the regional economies. Alumni studies have been absent and information about labor markets is scarce. Now that these data start to be generated, the assumption about saturated majors is being increasingly questioned.

Changing Systems
Based on the new data, the logical conclusion indicates that course offerings should be adjusted. That trend, however, is not as simple as it looks. Two decades of policies based on the assumption of saturated majors have modified the systems of higher education throughout Latin America. In all countries, governments have created new majors or new institutions. In several cases, funding decisions have been made that foster new majors or punish universities for offering the traditional ones.

Furthermore, money has been allocated to novel programs, hiring qualified faculty, and buying equipment to create attractive options. In the Mexican case, the federal government even opted to establish completely new public sectors, such as over 80 technical universities or, recently, 10 intercultural universities. All these institutions were set up with the overt mission to offer alternatives to the saturated traditional options.

Public and Private
At the same time, the introduction of enrollment caps for traditional majors in the public universities has led to a sometimes massive flight of students to the private sector. These universities readily offer the traditional options to applicants rejected by the public sector. Several of these private institutions charge high tuition fees for the traditional majors and can do so because students, in spite of governmental warnings that a traditional major can seriously damage one’s future, have voted with their feet. As a result, in Mexico, law, accountancy, and administration still constitute 30 percent of national undergraduate enrollments, just as they did 10 years ago, but over 50 percent of students majoring in these options now attend private institutions.

Reasons for Success
The sustainability of demand for traditional majors in the Mexican labor market can be explained by a number of reasons. First, the labor market demand for college graduates of traditional majors has remained consistent. This is perhaps due to the possibility that several new niches predicted for the future knowledge-based society never materialized. Also, majors in the sciences or the humanities prepare for teaching or research, but research remains concentrated in a few public universities with little new job positions.

Additionally, several novel options appear to be too specialized, preparing graduates for very specific positions such as ecotourism. For these positions, college graduates largely need to compete with graduates from traditional majors whose qualifications and skill base might be more easily recognized by employers. Taken in total, traditional majors in Latin America seem to offer a broader and more flexible preparation, not unlike general education in the United States.

Based on the findings from our study, it would appear that policies and changes in system design over the last two decades have been poorly informed by data on the complex relationship between higher education and the labor market. Consequently, public institutions appear to be less likely to prepare their graduates to meet the real demands of the labor market, perhaps even less so than a decade ago. As such, governmental policies have been successful in diversifying the supply side of higher education, but remarkably ineffective in changing student preferences or the labor market for graduates. Our results suggest that students might have a better feel of what the market demands than policymakers do and that the simple introduction of new majors is unlikely to change the economy.

An extensive analysis can be found in: Cabrera, A., W. de Vries, and S. Anderson (2008). Job Satisfaction Among Mexican Alumni: A Case of Incongruence Between Hunch-Based Policies and Labor Market Demands, Higher Education.

[Online] Available: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/Number54/p20_de_Vries_et_al.htm