Strategy under attack

THE government's higher education strategy has been attacked for encouraging undergraduate vocationalism at the expense of the real graduate qualities valued by industry. In this month's edition of Industry and Higher Education journal, Gabriel Jacobs, of the University of Wales Swansea, argues that The Learning Age green paper wrongly presupposes that universities should focus on teaching workplace skills rather than the traditional disciplines of academic study.

Dr Jacobs, dean of the faculty of business, economics and law at Swansea, writes: "If industry needs - as it surely should and does - inquiring, innovative, critical minds in the graduates it recruits, higher education would do well to be wary of a force that may push it too far down Relevance Road."