Qualifications as a Defining Feature of Higher Education

Abstract

The changing place of university qualifications as education grows in scale and is managed to meet the needs of employers and the economy as efficiently as possible is a major feature of the wicked problem of university change. The tension between qualifications as material or positional goods is entangled with the sense of the university as an élite experience and reflects an ongoing race for individual advantage—a winner-takes-all market that is described as the ‘diploma disease’. A contributor to the wicked sate of qualifications is the use of human capital theory as part of a neoliberal positioning of education that in practice increases the congestion of student interest in prestigious universities. The Korean higher education system is used as a case study to illustrate the wicked consequences of unmanaged qualification systems and the power that social and cultural forces have on the importance of qualifications and the legitimation of the inequality that arises from the current systems.