Neoliberal Rationalities in Vocational Higher Education

The increasing function of universities as institutions for mass education might affect democracy and the universities' contribution to society. Students as choice-agents need to be involved in these processes. This paper scrutinises how students’ practical considerations for future choices in education and occupations correspond to policy objectives of socially productive educational choices. These objectives currently follow neoliberal rationalities regarding how to divide the responsibilities between the state and its citizens. In this context, choice-agents have to learn to identify themselves as economic subjects able to cope with economic transformation.

The aim of our research is to examine the correspondence between educational policy objectives and students’ educational choices in practice. The research questions posed are to what extent students’ choices and motives reflect a (neoliberal) instrumentality? Is there a resistance against such rationalities in students’ actual choice-strategies? This issue is empirically investigated via a semi-structured questionnaire (n=840) with students from 14 vocational Swedish Human Resource programmes in higher education. The case of higher education programme was seen relevant, since weak professional university programmes tend to stimulate rationalities amongst students that ritualise the role of education in terms of its formal credentials. Vocational programs are also a significant growth sector in higher education, with large proportions of non-traditional students.

What is unclear, however, is whether these forms of education reinforce a desired policy ambition with regard to instrumental choices in education. These are policy rationalities that are questioned in the paper from a critical semantic approach indicating that the policies fundamentally rest on manipulative powers where human agency is forced into instrumental decision-making. The results of the study point to patterns where students tend to resist instrumentality and integrate their decisions in education as reflexive and relative autonomous personal projects in relation to the recognized social powers of the labour market.