Abstract:

The purpose of this study was to explore the extent to which undergraduate college students involved in a hydrology/fluvial geomorphology-oriented physical geography, international fieldwork program experienced and were engaged in 31 marketable job skills.

As many in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) are aware, the 1999 Bologna Process spawned a focus on student employability in the seminal framework across the 48-country European region. The development and acquisition of transferable employability skills was outlined as a goal for EHEA colleges and universities. Similarly, policy makers in countries such as Australia and Malaysia have been considering this issue for some time and China now has similar issues whereby “a higher education degree is no longer a guarantee of employability” (Mok, Wen, & Dale, 2016, p. 266) due in part to education/skills mismatches.

Meanwhile, in the United States, marketable employability skills as an issue in higher education is more recent, driven by the high cost of higher education and social polarization. The State of Texas has adopted the 60x30TX higher education strategic plan where the focus on marketable skills is one of four goals. Marketable skills are closely tied to experiential learning. “Experiential learning is critical for developing marketable skill sets to complement classroom learning,” as is undergraduate research (Trinity, 2019, 2). However, all too often these vaguely stated skills are referred to as “soft skills,” diminishing them to “easy,” “effeminate,” and “mushy” (Hora, Benbow, & Smolarek, 2018, p. 33). When reframed through a cultural capital paradigm, “skills are context-dependent, culturally determined, and subjectively valued” (Hora et al., 2018, p. 33).

It is through this shifted paradigm that this study was designed and carried out using a modified version of an instrument developed specifically for international geography and Earth science field studies programs—the TUNING Survey (Wall & Speake, 2012). Thus, the context, geography and Earth science culture, and subjectivity were built into the instrument, following the cultural capital paradigm.

At the end of an undergraduate physical geography fieldwork program in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, students were administered a 31-item cultural capital skills instrument. Descriptive, reliability, and bivariate correlation analyses were completed on the results demonstrating the students’ perceptions of their newly acquired skills. In addition, I included three open-ended questions related to students’ responses. I analyzed these results using a phenomenological analysis approach.

References:
[1] Hora, M. T., Benbow, R. J., & Smolarek, B. B. (2018) Re-thinking soft skills and student employability: A new Paradigm for Undergraduate education. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 50(6), 30-37.
[2] Mok, K. H., Wen, Z., & Dale, R. (2016). Employability and mobility in the valorisation of higher education qualifications: the experiences and reflections of Chinese students and graduates. Journal of Higher Education Policy & Management, 38(3), 264–281.
[3] Trinity University. (2019). Office of experiential learning. Inside Trinity. Retrieved from https://inside.trinity.edu/office-experiential-learning
[4] Wall, G. P., & Speake, J. (2012). European geography higher education fieldwork and skills agenda. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 36(3), 421-435.

Keywords:

Employability, experiential education, cultural capital, marketable skills.