Book Review: Universities and the Labour Market: Graduate Transitions from Education to Employment by Magdalena Jelonek

Abstract

Magdalena Jelonek’s Universities and the Labour Market: Transitions from Education to Employment is a critical review of Poland’s Career Development Programme (CDP). A government-led initiative beginning in 2014 that provided grants to postsecondary institutions, CDP was intended to support soon-to-be postsecondary graduates in the transition to full employment by developing in-demand work competences not typically part of university or college curricula. Institutions proposed projects that aligned with one of the five competence streams—professional, communication, IT, analytical, and entrepreneurship—and winning projects would be greenlit and funds allocated to the school. Jelonek uses the outcomes of the program to critically examine the role of universities as economic stimuli and worker competence development at a time when the commodification of higher education is increasingly conspicuous. While the program was not considered a clear success in Poland, Jelonek situates the economic intervention within a labor market that at the time was quickly strengthening after the 2008 global recession in order to better understand its outcomes and how the program can be used as a model moving forward. The first two parts of the book are devoted to contextualizing the socio-economic paradigms that informed the program. Jelonek weaves together a critical analysis of dominant neoliberal ideologies that prioritize labor as human capital and mesh with the growing commodification and “massification” of Poland’s higher education industry (p. 3). She argues that because the value of education is widely regarded as relative, workers are reliant on signaling their skill and competence level to employers. As such, public interventions, such as CDP, lean heavily into performative outcomes such as certificates that can be included in CVs. A material motivation to participate in the CDP skewed participation in favor of competence streams that provided tangible rewards (such as certificates) for completing projects. Additionally, a lack of equitable stop-gaps in the application process led to already well-supported institutions and students winning the majority of the grants. While this divide in accessibility was not officially documented, Jelonek suggests that it had an unintended effect on the documented outcomes of the program. The driving strength of Universities and the Labour Market comes from Jelonek’s dissection of the program’s outcomes in third and final part of the book. In accounting Book Reviews