Graduate employability, curriculum rationalisation, and the Australian regulatory state

Abstract

In June 2020, the Australian Coalition Government introduced the Job Ready Graduates (JRG) policy, seeking to discourage student uptake of humanities and social sciences (HASS) courses by increasing their cost by up 116.9%. This article offers a preliminary investigation into HASS undergraduate course offerings at four Australian universities. It finds no consistently observable effect on course offerings, but rather long-term and unevenly dispersed curriculum rationalisation, shaped by an individual discipline’s capacity to act entrepreneurially and articulate their value in economic terms. JRG is illustrative of policymaking within Australia’s regulatory state, which has hollowed-out universities whilst driving the creation of internal markets. Simultaneously, JRG demonstrates the role of universities in reproducing market citizenship ideals, fostering greater individual participation in markets in service of national economic priorities. We argue that the Albanese Labor Government’s Universities Accord is largely continuous with these processes, with ramifications for those disciplines considered economically unimportant.