The formative merits of university education are at risk of being reduced from graduateness in the sense of broad academic cultivation to professional training with a strong emphasis on employability. The difficulty in opposing this trend is the absence of a clear framework for academic cultivation. The aim of this study is to construct a model that uses the formative function of university education as a starting point, that distinguishes graduateness from employability, and that integrates theories on reflective thinking, scholarship, moral reasoning and lifelong learning. This approach offers the possibility of making use of insights from established theoretical traditions in the study of the intellectual development of students. For this study, a questionnaire was developed to investigate graduateness, or intellectual cultivation, among students in a research university. Structural equation modelling revealed that the expected structure was confirmed by the data. Reflective thinking has the strongest influence on lifelong learning; however, scholarship and moral citizenship are also important elements.

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Our research aims to contribute to the body of knowledge on graduateness by proposing a model that explicates the expected level performance of graduates. In this study, the model is elaborated for 3 graduateness domains: reflective thinking, scholarship, and moral citizenship. We used data on students' perceived abilities in these domains that were collected at both the beginning and end of 1-year master's programmes in 3 faculties at a research-intensive university. The model appears to be suitable for investigating students' academic intellectual development. Not all students appeared to achieve the expected level of graduateness by the end of the master's programme. However, the results revealed an increase in the proportion of students meeting the thresholds for graduateness. The students' reports reveal growth in reflective thinking and scholarship during the master's programme. ARTICLE HISTORY

Potentially all university graduates, regardless of the discipline they have studied, are expected to have obtained generic learning outcomes, which we refer to as 'graduateness' . This study investigates the extent to which learning programmes' emphasis on graduateness affects students' perceived abilities in the domains of graduateness. Four domains of graduateness are considered: reflective thinking, scholarship, moral citizenship and lifelong learning. Based on curriculum maps, master's programmes were clustered according to the emphasis placed on each domain. Unexpectedly, there appeared to be no difference in students' perceived competence in the four domains of graduateness between master's programmes that placed little to no emphasis on reflective thinking, moral citizenship or lifelong learning and master's programmes that placed more emphasis on these domains. Only in the scholarship domain was a difference found in students' perceived competence; surprisingly, it was in the opposite direction. In conclusion, we can say that the relation between emphasis on the domains of graduateness and students' perceived abilities in these domains were not found across a large sample of study programmes.

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