Higher Education, Knowledge, and Work: Transformations and Unsolved Tensions

This chapter concludes the book. It presents the main insights addressed and opens up the analysis of the knowledge economy towards emerging dilemmas. It summarises the main arguments, which were related to graduate career paths, the shifting and contradictory roles of higher education, and the internal hierarchies that shape employment, including the (failed) promise of more socially inclusive economies. It highlights that the book did not aim to take sides and propose new policy approaches, but to interrogate the assumptions that frame the policy discourses on the role of universities. While political agendas focus on job creation, this book raised questions about the kind of jobs that are made available, how careers are reconfigured, the social and political implications of these processes, and how the grand sociological themes of gender, class, education, ethnicity, age, and location play a role. The concluding chapter reinstates that the benefits of the knowledge economy are spatially confined to regions specialising in knowledge-intensive services and dominated by tech elites, with economic, social, educational, and political implications. It interrogates the status-quo which places a tech minority in control of societal development. The conclusions encourage revising the values shaping educational and economic systems, towards more inclusive, better regulated and fair knowledge economy.