Policies for Equality and Employability

Abstract

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC License at the time of publication. CAMILLA THUNBORG AND AGNIESZKA BRON 9. POLICIES FOR EQUALITY AND EMPLOYABILITY Consequences for Non-Traditional Students in Sweden The general picture in Sweden, as elsewhere, is that higher education (HE) graduates have better chances to become employed than people with a lower educational level. Sweden has had a long tradition of including non-traditional students into HE by widening access, building new higher education institutions, and upgrading post-secondary education to tertiary education (SOU, 2015; Thunborg & Bron, 2012). The number of HE graduates has increased dramatically as a result of these changes. During the recent decade, and in accordance with EU and national policies, issues of employability have become politically important. Fejes (2010) claims, that the shift from employment to employability means a shift in responsibility from society and the labour market towards the individual. HE institutions (HEI) are also seen as responsible for enhancing or developing the appropriate competencies of individual students (SOU, 2015). The match between the supply of educational graduates and the requirements and demands of the labour market has thereby become a market model for measuring HE effects. The policy for widening access of non-traditional students and the policy of employability can, on the one hand, be regarded as two strategies for enhancing social mobility. But, on the other hand, the two policies do not seem to be related to each other. For example, when studying policy documents, we cannot find any special concern for non-traditional students in relation to employability. Thus, in this article we want to address the relation between issues of equality and employability, especially regarding their consequences for Swedish non-traditional students. Our interest in this question derives from our involvement in the European Erasmus+ project called EMPLOY Enhancing the Employability of Non-Traditional Students in HE in which six countries are taking part (2014-1-UK01-KA203-001842-TP). By non-traditional students we mean, in the broadest sense, under-represented groups participating in HE (Bron & Lönnheden, 2004). In this chapter as elsewhere (Finnegan, Merrill, & Thunborg, 2014), when writing about non-traditional students we refer to mature as well as young adult students that are the first in their family to enter HE in Sweden (see Thunborg, Bron, & Edström, 2012). However, in this text we focus particularly on social class and ethnicity. When writing about social class we refer to parents' educational level as used in Swedish official statistics. When