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Manfred Stock, Alexander Mitterle and David P. Baker

What do universities teach us?

A common trope in public discourse today is that the university serves as an ideological hub: a place that infuses the minds of the new generations with ideas that threaten contemporary worldviews. In such discussions, the sweeping impact higher education has on society is narrowed towards questions of gender, race, inequality, colonialism, global hegemony, and capital. The critique takes a staunch Hobbesian view of the university: who controls the university “programm[s]” what people think.

Only vaguely do such accounts discuss the educational impact of the university on the transformation of work. Without the cognitive and specific skills acquired in physics, law, engineering, or political science a vast number of jobs could not be performed adequately. Surprisingly, the professional function of advanced education is often perceived as just responding to the demands of the economy: Technological change and market forces create new occupations, and then universities simply respond with new degrees and curricula aimed at training future workers with specific new skills – often over-educating the demand.

Advancing earlier Parsonian and new institutionalist ideas on higher education, we emphasize an underappreciated yet growing concurrent alternative process: universities, with their global growth in numbers and enrolments, in concert with expanding research capacity, create and privilege knowledge and skills, legitimate new degrees that then become monetized and even required in private and public sectors of economies. A process we refer to as the academization of occupations and develop in our recent book, How Universities Transform Occupations and Work in the 21st Century: The Academization of German and American Economies (Stock, Mitterle, & Baker, 2024).

Such a process has tremendous implications for understanding the transformation of capitalism, new dimensions of social inequality, and resulting stratification among occupations, but it also emphasizes the non-linear relation between higher education and employment. If the university is productive in its own rights the knowledge and skills acquired in the university may create very different pathways into employment than envisioned by those instituting new degrees. In the following we briefly outline the argument for academization and then provide examples from seven case studies across two most-different OECD countries regarding education-to-work-pathways – Germany and the U.S.

 

The Academization of Occupations

Put succinctly, academization is a process by which more aspects of occupations, job content, and preparation are permeated by the full range of institutional products of formal education. As mass advanced education increases, the number of occupational fields of action and jobs in work organizations tailored to college graduates also increases, but academization also represents a profound transformation beyond expanding enrolment.

Take, for example, one of the key institutional products of academization and the cultural power of the university to transform occupations—the degree program. The expansion of applied degree programs in Germany and majors, minors, and graduate degrees in the U.S. reflects a logic of academization that implies material and social classification with consequences for job activities. The degrees awarded on successful completion of academic programs do not just represent and classify the curricular study programs nor just the corresponding expectations in terms of a graduate’s abilities, competencies, and skills in a material sense. They also classify programs as a legitimate and appropriate basis for performing specific practical tasks, providing services, and solving practical problems. As such, academic degrees also specify responsibilities for specific occupational fields and the working capacity of the graduates produced by universities.

Far beyond mere boundary maintenance among occupations, the combination of educationally enhanced cognitive functioning and specialized knowledge—acquired through degree competition—contributes to the human capital stock, productivity, wage differentials, and an education-oriented reordering of the occupational hierarchy, and thus to the social stratification system (cf. Baker et al., 2024; Mitterle et al., 2024). Degrees also classify and reclassify areas of professional responsibility and, hence, also employment positions. Often such classifications do not primarily stem from the world of work itself or even from work experience. Instead, over the long course of the university, they emerge from an academic process of knowledge production, redefining cultural ideas, and institutionalizing these with new areas and degrees in both countries examined here (Baker, 2011; Stock, 2016).

  Comparative cases of academization: institutionalizing expectations for the world of work

Contrasting country cases highlights consistencies in the process as well as the institutional forces from within national education systems that make certain dimensions of academization of occupations more salient. In each country, degree classifications are integrated with social classifications shaped by that nation’s unique educational structure. This mechanism aligns academic qualifications with occupational fields (such as public sector roles) in both material and social terms, thereby institutionalizing expectations regarding the practical applicability of academic skills, as well as the definition of roles within organizations and across occupations.

As a result, academization functions recursively across disciplines, occupations, societal expectations, and state regulations and policies. While each academic degree follows its own distinct trajectory, there are informative commonalities across cases—consider three of these.

First, across its various disciplines, the academic world increasingly classifies societal challenges as requiring authoritative interventions involving both high and low technologies. Entrepreneurship education, for example, emerged in response to the growing economic and technological significance of entrepreneurial activity, despite persistently high failure rates. Universities were tasked with studying and teaching entrepreneurship as a formal discipline, with the aim of reducing the frequency of start-up closures. Interestingly, this emphasis did not fundamentally reduce business closure rates, but it did make entrepreneurialism a theoretical—academic—subject for both teaching and research. The curricular focus of these programs reinforced an entrepreneurial culture that increasingly privileged the knowledge and practices of founding within “a theory of the company” as a rightful topic within universities.

A similar example is the set of academic business concepts behind full automation, developed within companies during the 1970s, which ultimately laid the groundwork for today’s digitalization agenda to emerge primarily as an academic endeavour. Both developments were further reinforced by the internal coherence of university mathematics, which reframed diverse occupational activities as mathematical problems, enabling the quantification of entrepreneurship and organizational efficiency.

Second, an expanding academic community constructs demand for new skills and services in specific occupational fields. This is accompanied by growing the number of graduates taking those skills into occupations, but this also includes the upgrading of skills and services based on the university’s knowledge systems. Thus, knowledge and competencies that can draw on scientific (i.e., all kinds of science, including behavioral and social sciences) evidence are valued more highly than those that are derived from generalizations based purely on experience or outdated knowledge. The fact that with educational expansion this is not merely an elite process but is now spread widely across all types of jobs and occupations adds further legitimacy to academization. When graduates with academic qualifications are available and lay claim to occupational areas of responsibility, this can devalue the knowledge base of those who have previously occupied these roles directly or indirectly.

The case of preschool education the U.S. shows the direct path: Scholarly research and the expansion of bachelor’s degree requirements went hand in hand, increasingly infusing early childhood education with cognitive skill requirements obtained in the university. In Germany, early childhood graduates met an institutionalized and highly valued and expansive vocational education system, leading to perceptions of mismatch in childcare practice among graduates, often channelling them into leadership or quality assurance positions. Indirectly they incrementally transform the discourse on early childhood education reframing the educational setting, parental views of child learning, and quality procedures in place.

Third, the construction of new skills through the academization process can lead to new job descriptions through synergy and also conflict: for instance, “architectural engineering” as a degree combines mathematical and technical skills with architectural imagination, anticipating and increasing overlap between the occupations, but also instituting new ways of combining building knowledge – such as in digital building modelling and maintenance. Learning therapy, in contrast, is structured through an academic struggle between pedagogy and psychology on the role of social and individual factors in learning problems, translating into different expectations and job profiles for practitioners.

In terms of both construction of new occupational and work categories to meet new social needs, the academization argument and the cases briefly presented here reconceptualize the relationship between university education and employment away from outdated historical social and material classifications.

The analysis of academization – as the first of its kind – built on country and case studies introduces the process of academization of occupations to the sociology of occupations, work, and ultimately the social stratification of post-industrial society. The cases do make clear that without a theory of academization many salient empirical trends of education, employment, worker skills, and advanced capitalism will remain underexplained.

 

Manfred Stock is at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), Institute for Sociology. Alexander Mitterle is at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), Centre for School and Educational Research / Institute for Sociology. David P. Baker is at the Pennsylvania State University (US), Department of Sociology and Criminology.

 

Literature:

Baker, D. (2011).  Forward and backward, Horizontal and Vertical: Transformation of Occupational Credentialing in the Schooled Society. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility: A Journal of the International Sociological Association, 29(1), 5-29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2011.01.001

Mitterle, A., Mathies, A., Maiwald, A. & Schubert, C. (Eds.), Akademisierung – Professionalisierung. Zum Verhältnis von Hochschulbildung, akademischem Wissen und Arbeitswelt. Wiesbaden: Springer.

Baker, D., Schaub, M., Choi, J. & Ford, K. (2024). Education: The Great Equalizer, Social Reproducer, or Legitimator of New Forms of Social Stratification? In M. Berends, S. Lamb & B. Schneider (Eds.),  The Sage handbook of Sociology of Education. Sage.

Stock, M. (2016). Arbeitskraft- und Stellentypisierungen. Organisationssoziologische Überlegungen zum Zusammenhang zwischen Bildung und Beschäftigung. In M. S. Maier (Eds.), Organisation und Bildung (pp. 73-91). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

Stock, M., Mitterle A. and D. P. Baker (Eds.) (2024) How Universities                                                             Transform Occupations and Work in the 21st Century: The Academization of German and American Economies. Series on International Perspectives on Education and Society, Emerald Publishing: Bingley, U.K.

The post Academization: How Universities Transform Occupations and Work in the 21th Century appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Plenary session and committee meetings

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A delegation of eight Members of the Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET), led by Chair David McAllister, will travel to Uruguay and Argentina from 26 to 29 May. Members will engage in high-level discussions regarding the EU-Mercosur Partnership Agreement which was concluded last December in Montevideo, Uruguay. The findings from this visit will contribute to the preparatory work for the consent procedure on the political and cooperation aspects of the Agreement, for which AFET is responsible.
More broadly, this mission will allow to exchange views on bilateral, regional and multilateral cooperation, as well as geopolitical issues such as Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, the situation in the Middle East, and China's expanding influence in Latin America.
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On 13 May 2025, the Committee on Foreign Affairs will hold a public hearing on the political relations between the European Union and the United States of America. Members will have the possibility to discuss with a panel of three distinguished experts on transatlantic relations about the current state of relations and prospects for future developments.
The public hearing will feed into the preparation of the AFET own-initiative report on EU-US political relations by AFET Standing Rapporteur on the United States, Michal Szczerba.
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Draft Programme
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The Committee on Security and Defence (SEDE) and the Committee on Transport and Tourism (TRAN) organises a joint public hearing on 'Military Mobility' on Wednesday, 14 May 2025 from 14.30 to 17.00hrs in Brussels (room ANTALL 4Q2), to discuss with experts the state of play and future prospects of military mobility in the EU in view of the upcoming joint non-legislative report.
Location : ANTALL 4Q2
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     Brigadier Katrien D’HERT (EU Military Staff)
     Lieutenant General André BODEMANN (Bundeswehr Germany)
     Lieutenant Colonel Pasi SEPPÄLÄ (Ministry of Defence Finland)
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On 14 and 15 May, SEDE will hold its next meeting. SEDE Members will notably discuss with the EEAS and Commission representatives, the implementation of the EU Action Plan on cable security and actions taken to increase EU security and resilience against threats posed to the Union's critical infrastructure. There will also be an item on the implementation of the European Defence Industrial Strategy and on how the latest developments -
like the White Paper on Strengthening European Defence, the ReArm Europe plan/Readiness 2030 and the forthcoming "Defence Simplification Omnibus" - relate to the benchmarks as set out in the Strategy. On 14 May, a joint hearing of the SEDE and TRAN Committees is also organised on 'Military mobility' to discuss with experts the state of play and future prospects of military mobility in the EU in view of the upcoming joint non-legislative report.

Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

The Committee on Security and Defence (SEDE) and the Committee on Transport and Tourism (TRAN) organises a joint public hearing on 'Military Mobility' on Wednesday, 14 May 2025 from 14.30 to 17.00hrs in Brussels (room ANTALL 4Q2), with external experts.
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Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP