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whole 'uni' experience

meeting new people

living away from home

broadening horizons

Britain:

comparison to non-university friends

Time at university as...

  • Grounding my work in contemporary debates

TRANSFORMATIVE

Singapore:

more content-related

personally rewarding

eg. gender studies affecting personal relationships

Overview

understanding the world better

site for self-development

changing outlook

  • Why a cross cultural comparison?
  • Research design
  • Fieldwork and analysis

1.Context

Context

Methodology

  • Descriptive findings
  • Future directions

Initial findings

3. Initial findings

strategized approaches

practices of differentiation

Singapore:

privileged leisure class?

COMPETITIVE PRESSURE

stratified opportunities

widely felt across sample

interpreted in distinct ways

Britain:

less-specific

Research Context

wait and see

delaying entry to graduate labour market

  • Globalisation and post-industrialisation
  • A ‘knowledge-based economy’ and the increased importance of education
  • Investing in skills and knowledge in order to compete
  • Learning = earning
  • Enrolments in Tertiary Education doubled within a decade from 72 to 136 million globally (1996-2007)
  • Education as an arbiter of wealth and success

MERITOCRACY AND INEQUALITY

MOMENTUM?

players or purists?

Student orientations to learning and understandings of success

can you still be yourself and succeed?

  • Instrumental learning?
  • Rise of acquisitive rather than inquisitive learning
  • Learners consumers
  • Employability and understandings of success, identity and authenticity
  • ‘Playing the game’ (Brown and Hesketh 2004)

relationship between equality of opportunity and personal responsibility for failure

Where next?

muddimanek@cardiff.ac.uk

“this commercialisation of higher education…softens students up for the rigours of globalisation. By creating a market, young people are encouraged to think and behave like rational economic man. They become ‘human capital’, calculating the rate of return on their university investment, a degree becomes a share certificate, commercialisation conditions students to expect no help from others, or society, and therefore never to provide help in return, debt and economic conditioning discourages graduates from going into lower-paid caring jobs - and instead to the City, where the real ‘value’ is. It fashions a Britain that competes rather than cares”

Lawson, The Guardian (2008)

a) the economic returns to getting a university degree are more certain

b) there is a lack of social welfare for the unemployed

c) the discursive space for critical debate is likely to be more limited

(relative to the UK)

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Singapore

  • Estimated per capita GDP: US$62,100
  • Investment of GDP 27.2%
  • Estimated industrial production growth rate 25%
  • Labour force: 3.075 million
  • Unemployment rate: 2.1%
  • Literacy rate: 92.5% (96.6% for males, 88.6% females)
  • Education expenditure: 3.0% of GDP

Economic breakdown (2010)

Britain

  • Estimated per capita GDP: US$34,800
  •  Investment of GDP 14.4%
  • Estimated industrial production growth rate 1.9%
  • Labour force: 31.45 million
  • Unemployment rate: 7.9%
  • Literacy rate: 99%
  • Education expenditure: 5.5% of GDP

Graduates in the labour market report 2012 (ONS)

Singapore

Britain

The case in Singapore

Rationale for comparison: Why Britain and Singapore?

  • Different economic conditions for graduates
  • Different policy approaches to higher education
  • Different socio-cultural framing of education and economy

Research aims and questions

  • To examine how success is perceived by undergraduate students based on contrasting national models of educational, economic and social governance.
  • To examine the social construction of success through education and the job market.

Research aims

  • How do undergraduate students understand success in terms of education, employment and lifestyle choices?
  • To what extent are perceptions of success (and failure) shaped by cultural, educational and labour market context within Britain and Singapore?

Research questions

  • Socio-economic context
  • Subject area
  • Gender
  • Official policy discourse vs. student understandings

Four key comparisons

  • In-depth semi-structured qualitative interviews (42 participants)
  • Fieldnotes
  • Follow up questionnaires
  • Follow up interviews (8 participants)
  • Coding and thematic analysis

Research Design

2. Methodology

Participants

Britain

Sociology

  • Beth
  • Gwen
  • Annie
  • Xena
  • Alice
  • Joe
  • Ted
  • Vincent
  • Andrew

Singapore

  • Brigit
  • Lily
  • Kate
  • Violet
  • Sadie

Business

  • Jess
  • Rachel
  • Emily
  • Nicole
  • Cherry
  • Rudy
  • Carl
  • Felix
  • Steve
  • Abel
  • Micheal
  • Gavin
  • Greg
  • Kurt
  • Christian
  • Harry
  • Jean
  • Val
  • Jill
  • Grace
  • Della
  • Isobel
  • Vernon
  • Jimmy
  • Ben
  • Raymond
  • Reggie

The case in Singapore

  • Gained independence from the Malaysian Federation in 1965
  • Unemployment/housing crisis
  • Lack of natural resources
  • Rational strategy to industrialise
  • Unprecedented economic development 1965-1997
  • Developmental state: ensuring a tight connection between education and economy
  • Purpose of education: to fuel the economy

Comparative case-study design

  • ‘Thinking without comparison is unthinkable. And, in the absence of comparison, so is all scientific thought and scientific research’ (Swanson 1971:145)
  • ‘Comparison provides a basis for making statements about empirical regularities and for evaluating and interpreting cases relative to substantive and theoretical criteria’ (Ragin1987:1)
  • Cases as configurations: holistic approach to accounting for specific historical outcomes, comparable outcomes, current institutional arrangements, or social life in general
  • Making sense of different cases by piecing together evidence in light of enabling conditions and limiting means (context)

Learning Equals Earning: student understandings of success in Britain and Singapore

Esther Muddiman

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