Mass Higher Education and the Knowledge Economy

Many accounts of the knowledge economy are mechanistic, even linear. There are inputs—capital, skills, research, development—and outputs—technologically sophisticated goods and services that power economic development (and, although often sotto voce, social wellbeing). It is this discourse that guides most national research, innovative and industrial strategies. An alternative account, playing down this mechanistic linearity, and emphasising instead the location of the knowledge economy in a complex and reflexive ecosystem comprising social and cultural as well as economic and technological components, is less popular. This account emphasises the heterogeneity (even chaos) of ‘knowledge actors’ rather than a grand chain of scientific discovery beginning with basic science and moving through stages to the production of marketable (or socially beneficial) goods and services. This chapter argues that the development of mass higher education has created new realities—in multiple contexts (including personal identity, social formation and cultural capital). These new realities have impacted on the knowledge economy through the reshaping of occupational structures, career expectations, and even redefinition of the goals (and limits) of economic development. These impacts cannot be reduced to simple models of the production and reproduction of a highly skilled workforce and targeted research and development.