Widening access in Higher Education in the context of flexible labor policy: Training and Lifelong L

1
Widening access in Higher Education in the
context of flexible labor policy Training and
Lifelong Learning in the case of the European
Strategy for Employment.

• Nikos Papadakis
• UNIVERSITY OF PELOPONNESE

2
Preliminary Remarks

• The flexibility, as a new value either embedded
  in or (re)claimed by the employment policies,
  seems to be accompanied by a constant
  perseverance in the notion of competitiveness
  (Krugman 1994). Both appear
• to re-determine the limits of the general moral
  /political bond and the role of the individual
  interrelations of profit in the collective social
  engagements about prosperity (in terms of Amartya
  Sen/cf. Sen 1987 40 - 51),
• to strengthen the pure market relations against
  the morally directed individual economic
  actions, encouraging the emergence of
  digressive types of moral action, as the
  epicurism (welfarism), and
• fatefully re-contextualize the active pair
  agency - well being.
• Within this functional context, a shift in a new
  form of activity in employment policies is
  taking place

3

• Educational policy is more and more considered
  an active employment policy. Simultaneously the
  responsibilities for the unemployment and the
  relevant problems in the labor organization are
  usually ascribed
• in the inelasticity, the absence of functionality
  and the deficient adaptability of educational
  systems (cf. more analytically European
  Commission 1995 24- 25 and Pyrgiotakis
  Papadakis 2002 231) and
• in the inefficient transition of young people
  from the educational system to the employment,
  that is the form of transition, that has the
  tendency to delay the moment of entry, often is
  incomplete or unsuccessful and it is usually
  crystallized in a structural problem (cf.
  Ministry of Labour and Social Security 2001).

4
Training and Employment. From the European
Employment Strategy (EES) to the National Plans
of Action for the Employment The visiting
aspects of a renegotiated relation.

• The main policy domains of EES, synopsized in the
  4 EES Pillars, document the role of training as
  an active labor policy. More specifically
• The Business Dexterity Pillar emphasizes the
  creation of structures and the promotion of
  actions for the facilitation of transition from
  the educational system to the employment
  structures, via the mediatory operation of
  training services.
• The Adaptability Pillar, promotes the adoption
  of a totally new approach in the organization of
  labor, that will allow the adaptation of labor to
  the emerging economic and technological
  developments (adaptability) and will leave
  space for the employees life-long training
  (cf. relatively Papadakis 2003 15).
• We should also notice that the consensus in the
  objectives between the Member States and the
  maintenance of a relative autonomy concerning the
  characteristics - components of national
  policies, bring up the question of "convergence
  via open co-ordination" . It is about a tool of
  policy- planning that is based on the
  benchmarking, the information exchange and the
  experts re-viewing.

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• In conclusio, the new significances, that are
  becoming focal points for the European Employment
  Policies and for the subsequent re-definition of
  the role of employment structures, are
• Life-long learning,
• investment in the human potential,
• convergence, compatibility and comparability of
  employment and integrative policies and
  structures and finally
• the regional dimension.
• life-long learning,
• investment in the human potential,
• convergence, compatibility and comparability of
  employment and integrative policies and
  structures and finally
• the regional dimension.
• These significances- notions underline the
  policies and influence the "environment" of
  organization and operation of agencies and
  services (strategic context). In fact they are
  becoming the parametric context of policies and
  agencies. More specifically, the traditional
  domain of "employment agency" is extended, while
  the professional education, the adult education
  and training become the new priorities of the
  active employment policies.

6

• Already since 1998- 1999, on the basis of the
  National Action Plans for Employment 1998 and
  1999 and in the context of the announced adoption
  of the new multileveled strategic for the
  confrontation of the increased unemployment and
  uncertainty (ESDA 1998 1), the Employment
  Guideline 3 of Pilar I, Active measures to
  strengthen employability promotes the
  compensation of passive measures with training
  and retraining projects, while the Employment
  Guideline 5 of Pilar I focuses in the Growth of
  life- long learning.
• Greece is characterized by deficits and delays in
  both the afore-mentioned domains. In fact, Greece
  occupies for many years the last place in the
  E.U. regarding the expenses on vocational
  training. Simultaneously the life long training
  concerns only in the 1,1 of workers of age of
  25- 64 years (cf. Institute of Labor 2002 47),
  while the corresponding average in 15s Europe
  reaches the 8,4 (see EUROSTAT).

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• During 1999 and 2000, the initiation of the
  European Union Support Framework II (2000-2006)
  provoked a rather important change The first
  priority of this Framework was (and remains) the
  growth of human potential.
• More specifically the National Action Plan for
  Employment 2000 clarifies that the planning was
  based on the general policy directions of the
  European Employment Strategy (EES), which were
  specialized in special objectives and priorities
  according to the national particularities.
• At the same time other priorities of the European
  Union Support Framework II 2000-2006 include
  actions of reinforcement of employment and
  development of skills of human potential. In the
  context of the planned development of new skills
  (re-skilling) emphasis is laid on role of the
  Structural Funds, for the improvement of the
  employees and unemployds existing skills, the
  promotion of employment and the provision of
  equal opportunities to all.
• Critical is the role of the two main operational
  projects Employment and Professional Training
  and Education and Initial Professional Training
  which constitute the main priority of the project
  Development of Manpower (ESDA 2000 12).
• In any case, one fundamental aim of the national
  employment policies is the functional
  compatibility of the Operational Project
  "Continuing professional training and promotion
  of employment" and of the National Action Plans
  for Employment.

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• This aim is promoted via
• several initiatives reinforcing the operation of
  the General Account for the Employment and the
  Professional Training (LAEK),
• actions towards the promotion of the life-long
  learning which are inaugurated since 2000, such
  as the establishment of several targeted progects
  concerning unemployeds training by the Hellenic
  Manpower and Employment Organization (OAED), the
  unemployeds training provided by the private
  Centers for Vocational Training (KEK), the
  promotion of unemployeds training services run
  by local authorities, within the context of Local
  Plans for Employment (TSA),
• the creation of structures that aim at the
  connection of labor-market needs with the
  provided training, such as
• the National Observatory of Employment (EPA),
  that operates since February 1997, and
• the OAED Centers of Professional Training/ EKESEK
  (1999), that plan and product educational
  material for the OAED Training Centers,
• the networking of Agencies that aim either at the
  promotion of employment or at the provision with
  training services i.e. networking of the Centers
  for Vocational Training (KEK) with the OAED
  Centers for Promotion of Employment (KPA), in the
  context of the Operational Project for
  Unemployeds Continuing Training (Policy
  Guideline 3/ ESDA 2000),
• the establishment of the University Institutes of
  Life-Long Learning, that aim at both widening
  access in H.E. and improving the status and
  quality of the continuing and vocational
  education in Greece.

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Training Towards which type of employment?

• EES attempts to balance between
• the prospect of increasing flexibility in the
  employment and the subsequent hegemony of
  employability and
• the (legitimizing) statements that facilitate the
  formation of consociational politics among the
  social partners.
• The promotion of a procedural democracy in the
  development of labor policies and their
  interrelation with the training policies seems to
  constitute a process of legitimization.
• However the emerging pluralist system of
  representation of interests in national and
  supranational level (Streek and Schmitter 1991)
  is not enough
• to document the fetishism of social dialogue
  from a zero- base
• especially insomuch as the hierarchical and the
  closed character of negotiations between social
  partners and the modern regulating state, but
  also between interests groups themselves
  undermines the rather instrumental confusion
  between corporatist regulations and more general
  social aims (Schmitter and Lehmbruch 1979).
• Where is trust and which are the limits of
  supranational and national accountability in such
  a mix of policies, strategies and aims?
• The expectation to return in the goods of
  social dialogue, does not seem capable of
  "neutralizing" the intrigued allocation of
  policies against unemployment
• the state policies are encouraged to become more
  and more adaptable to the Market needs,
• while training and employment policies seems to
  be gradually overdetermined from macroeconomic
  policy.

10
A fundamental counter point

• Developments in employment and training,
  illuminate a fundamental counterpoint, that
  affects the considerations, the actions and
  mainly the individual strategies and life plans.
  This counterpoint
• concerns the meaning of quality in labor and
• symbolically depicts the post-industrial stakes
  in employment policies.
• Employees insist in comprehending satisfactory
  employment as full employment, deconstructing the
  value of flexibility and the subsequent value
  of adaptability (namely the post-industrial
  ratio communis utilitatis). An obvious inversion
  of values hierarchy is emerging here (in Amartya
  Sens terms)
• Satisfactory employment means complete and
  constant work for the vast majority of employees-
  workers,
• while it keeps on being conceptualized as
  flexible employment by corporations and giant
  economic trusts.
• Which is the regular and which is the reverse
  value?

11
Reshaping the State Policies in Education and
Training

• In such a context, the educational policy
  (concerning primary, secondary, post-secondary
  and higher education and continuing and adult
  education and training) is asked to be
  re-oriented and re-planned in terms of its
  relation to macro-economic aims and to the
  existing market needs. Educational Policy is
  gradually becoming an active employment policy,
  based on
• the fundamental relation between the accountable
  human capital and the economic growth
  contribution of human capital to economic
  growth/cf. OECD, 2001 especially ch. A3 p. 48-
  (p. 48- 52) and B (p. 53- 118) and Gravaris
  Papadakis 2002) and
• the relevant resolution of the problem of
  "discrepancy of skills" via the appropriate
  change- management in and by the educational
  policy.
• Therefore researchers in the domain of
  educational policy and in the domain of
  employment policies cannot ignore this precise
  frame, that constitutively alters (even more
  deregulates) their own researching task.

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Determining the field of research in the
educational policy New tendencies in policies in
education and training and a proposal of their
analysis.

• All the abovementioned changes have been
  occasionally attributed or summarized as the
  shift from the state to the market, activating a
  popular generalizing explanatory framework.
• This framework has a realistic base (orientation
  of educational systems in the market,
  renegotiation of the State, new public
  management, adoption of private economic
  criteria, accountability etc).
• In such an explanatory schema, the market is
  considered to operate as a quasi regulating
  circle. Subsequently it is fictionalized and
  considered, either as a mechanism of allocation
  of resources ex definitio, or as a process of
  policy elaboration.
• Such a generalizing version encourages
• the emergence of tautologies (the market that
  colonizes the citizens biokosmos),
• the metastasis of specific dogmatisms, which at
  their turn subvert the analytical emphasis in the
  details and
• the recognition of the complexity of the relation
  between the Market and the State.
• Expressis verbis a potential replacement of the
  scientific- analytical accuracy with a convincing
  generalizing ideological argument is taking place
  within the relevant literature. The
  aforementioned transition implied, in its turn,
  the elimination of educational policy as social
  policy.

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• A more profound study on the nature of the
  transformation- process, could de-mythologize it,
  revealing that this transition is, in fact, a
  succession of two particular forms of state
  intervention. A transition rather from a specific
  form of state intervention to another, than from
  the state to the market.
• The main dual change, regarding educational
  systems, concerns
• the distinction between the ideological and state
  policy agenda in education, and the domination of
  the neo-liberal paradigm (the EP core tends
  gradually to identify with the monetary form of
  macro-economical policy),
• the expenditures in education which tend to
  become more flexible and elastic, while the
  distribution between public and private
  expenditures is transformed, in favor of the
  de-nationalization and privatization of
  educational systems.
• The re-designing of education and training
  expenses is also related with the appointment of
  alternative educational practices, structures and
  institutions, that at their turn are consistent
  with the developments in the distribution and the
  organization of labor. Indicatively we report the
  consumerist control in the education, the choice
  driven systems of education and training, the
  strengthened role of self interest survival
  strategies, the polythematic and monothematic
  Higher Education Institutes, the insetting of
  administration principles of total quality - TQM
  - and components of the circle PCDA in several
  education and training Systems all over Europe
  (sometimes in the name of transparency,
  compatibility, efficiency and accountability),
  the development of life-long education and
  training towards specific orientations etc (cf.
  Gravaris and Papadakis, 2002, Deming, 1993 118,
  West Burnham, 1990).

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• Additionally the major forms of the state retreat
  concern
• The policy domain. The EP domain approximates
  decisively (occasionally is over-determined by)
  the labor market, while the human capital
  theory is being re-orientated, tending towards a
  human resource conception. In such a context,
  EP is mainly considered as a active labor market
  policy and widening access is conceptualized as a
  strategy to provide as many as employees and
  unemployeds with the appropriate skills.
• The institutional domain and the legitimative
  function of education (including adult and
  continuing education and training). Several
  changes have taken place regarding the equality
  of educational opportunities. Michael Apple,
  Geoff Whitty and other researchers observe that
  despite the promises for recognition and
  awareness of each kind of difference in our
  societies, the "rhetoric about the
  heterogeneity, the cultural pluralism, we become
  witnesses of a restoration of the old hierarchies
  and taxonomies (cf. Apple, 1996 and Apple, 2000
  315- 332, Whitty, Edwards Gewitz, 1993 180-
  181). The belief that we henceforth live in a
  post- modern world, the formulation of a new
  (potentially imaginary) post-modern community,
  seems to encourage surface transformations and
  scrappy solutions and to cover up the
  abovementioned restoration (cf. Apple, 1996 xi).
  The selectivity on social policy, the abandonment
  of the universalism in welfare provisions, the
  positive discrimination strategies could easily
  be transformed in the legitimating context of the
  shrinkage of social policy and subsequently of
  the educational policy as a social policy. I.e.
  EES comprehends equal opportunities as a matter
  of compensation of the gender inequalities
  (Pillar 4). It is all about a turn to the
  provision of selective, high standardized
  services to concrete minority and other
  disadvantaged groups, not to all however, not to
  all henceforth (Titmus, 2000 48- 49). In
  addition to all the above mentioned, the new
  concept of practical skills (that contribute to
  students adaptation) legitimate the promotion of
  qualifications without rights1, while the
  technical approach to life- long and life- wide
  education/ training sanctify rights without
  qualifications and legitimate a new piecemental
  social engineering (see Mishra 1984 9- 18). The
  Econocratic view of policy- making in education
  and the gradual exclusion of interest politics
  restrict the participation of the social partners
  in EP formation and the redistributing
  perspective of the educational systems.
• The policy rationality within the policy complex.
  Finally specific transformations take place,
  concerning
• the macro- economic intervention (transition from
  keynesianism to monetarism),
• the articulation of labor market policy to macro-
  economic policy,
• the articulation of educational policy to labor
  market policy,
• the macroeconomic over-determination of the state
  policy in education.

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The issue of Life-Long Education Training.
The influence of the "only viable answer" axiom.

• A semiotic reading, far away from the post-modern
  tradition, would easily trace the new hegemony of
  an old focal point investment. Human capital
  theory seems to return in a more instrumental
  version managing human resources and mobilizing
  individual strategies, under the prospect of
  their capitalization and in the context of the
  new theories of economic enlargement and growth.
  Many facts could affirm this development. The
  declared neutral dual goal towards the
  promotion of Life-Long education internas et
  externas muros of the official educational
  system, in order to
• exploit the collective life-course experience
  and
• increase- multiply the access to highly
  standardized learning opportunities throughout
  the lifecourse in order to permit employees to
  exercise a more extended control over their
  careers,
• appears now to be decisively connected to a less
  ideologically neutral goal.
• We are referring to the new emphasis in
  vocationally oriented adult education, through
  the adopting of the polymorphic approach. The
  abovementioned link among the two goals is not
  unusual, since even the most neutral policy is
  based on a frame of teleological outlines in
  order to create ideology and achieve less neutral
  political and economical aims.

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Implementing Life- Long Education.The
international state of the art A synopsis.

• However, what is happening till now, is that
  Life-Long Education (more precisely, specific
  forms of Life-Long Education in a tertiary level)
  is mainly actualized by
• Academic Institutes, which are characterized by
  relative autonomy concerning their curricula and
  actions and are supervised by relevant University
  Units - Departments (RUC in Denmark, Lifelong
  Learning Institute of Emporia State University in
  Kansas/ USA etc).
• Institutes collaborating with specific
  Universities (the Australian case is remarkable
  the National Board of Employment, Education and
  Training - NBEET - cooperates with the Adult
  Learning Australian Inc. and Universities such as
  the RMIT).
• Supranational or International Bodies, Units and
  Offices that have already acquired the
  appropriate know-how in adult education and
  continuing training. We just mention the EU
  Office for Human Potential, Education, Training
  and Youth, EU FORCE (Formation Continue en
  Europe) and more specifically the FORCE Technical
  Assistance Office, the European Center for the
  Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP),
  projects such as NOW (specialized in womens
  training) and HORIZON (specialized in persons
  with special needs), and specific initiatives-
  actions of LEONARDO DA VINCI (being now under the
  institutional "umbrella of SOCRATES).
• Researching and Training Consortia established
  between Universities and Enterprises. These
  Consortia create and support flexible, functional
  Life-Long curricula (such as the Stanford Online
  Program that concerns ICT and tele-communications
  experts and resulted from the collaboration of
  Stanford University, Microsoft and Compaq.
• Specialized Autonomous Institutions- Agents
  teaming up with broader monitoring planning
  Nets, in which several social and economical
  interest groups and enterprises are represented
  (in Ireland, the National Adult Learning Council
  with 33 decentralized Adult Learning Boards-
  cooperates with the Irish National Association
  for Adult Education AONTAS- / see O'Dea 2001.
• Corporate Universities have invaded both the
  academic arena and the training market. Motorola
  University is already expanded in 49 countries,
  occupying roughly 1000 academics (see France UCE
  1999). More than thirty Universities, in USA,
  (Universities of Motorola, IBM, Ford, Hewlett -
  Packard etc) have already developed a common
  ascertaining assessment system, aiming at the
  mutual recognition of the academic titles, they
  provide their students with.