Responsibility of the University in Employability: Development and validation of a measurement scale across five studies

This paper develops and validates, at a confirmatory level, a second‐order scale to measure Responsibility of the University in Employability (RUE). First, the literature on the components of RUE is explored and a formative conceptual model is proposed to underpin its measurement using extant research in the field of organisational responsibility and employability. At the empirical level, the second‐order RUE model considers the reputation of the university, the teaching staff, and the matching activities with employers as components of RUE. This model is based on five empirical studies. The first is a small‐sample study based on the opinions of experts (n = 5) and the rest are based on representative samples of university students (n = 816, n = 1,082, n = 1,088, and n = 1,203). A very good fit between model and data were revealed (CFI = 0.975; RMSEA = 0.039; standardised X2 = 2.676). The results indicate that matching activities with employers and teaching staff generate more RUE than university reputation. Guidelines are offered for managing the responsibility of the university in employability.