Graduate Employment: Challenges for Higher Education in the Twenty‐First Century∗

The employment prospects for most higher education graduates worldwide are bleak for a number of reasons including the negative effects of the massification of higher education, rapid technological change, the crisis in the conception of work in highly developed societies, and the neo‐liberal political and economic agenda. A number of survival strategies are proposed to students as well as ways to improve the link between employers and higher education institutions so as to improve the study/future employment match. Students are advised to be flexible, able and willing to innovate, entrepreneurial, proactive, and not only to be willing to take risks but to consider risk and uncertainty as forms of opportunity.