Policy Problems: Preparing Students for the “Real World”
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by Shannon McKechnie
mployability of students has risen as a key indicator of success of institutions, alongside an increased focus on policy for skills development in Canada. In Ontario, a hub for Canada’s economy, the issue of the “skills gap” has sustained interest as a significant but contested policy issue in public post-secondary education (Viczko, Lorusso, & McKechnie, 2019). Directed by policy and by public demand, significant resources at universities are invested into efforts to increase students’ skills capacities, career prospects, and overall employability. For student affairs staff (SAS), developing student career readiness and employability is central to many portfolios of our work (CACUSS, 2011). In my master’s thesis research, I conducted a qualitative study with SAS, with the intention of understanding how skills development policy discourses extend into the everyday reality of SAS who are ultimately responsible for its realization in post-secondary institutions. In this article, I present findings related to one of four themes that emerged from analysis of policy documents and interviews with SAS: preparing students for the “real world.”
The Study: Theory and Methods I consider this research a critical policy analysis. I draw mainly on policy scholars Stephen Ball and Carol Bacchi, both of whom utilize Foucauldian concepts of power (Ball, 1994; Ball et al., 2011; Bacchi, 2009, 2012; Foucault, 1980). In a critical approach, the researcher asks questions about the assumptions underlying the “problems” and evidence informing policy, considers who is involved in creating policy (and more importantly, who is left out), and understands policy as innately social, historical, and political, with implications beyond the intended solutions (Diem et al., 2014; Bacchi, 2009). Ball et al.’s (2011) concept of policy as discourse informs the theoretical foundation of this research, in which I understand policy as not simply a document or text that is negotiated, implemented, and reformed, but rather as an agent in our understanding of the “problem” it supposes to solve. Theoretically, treating policy as discourse lets us see the way policy does or accomplishes things: “We do not speak a discourse, it speaks us. We are the subjectivities, the voices, the knowledge, the power relations that a discourse constructs and allows… we are spoken by policies, we take up the positions constructed for us within policies.” (Ball, 1994, p. 22). Policies define problems in the way that the policies themselves are constructed, creating conditions for certain possibilities for interpretation and solution while limiting others. Bacchi refers to this as “problematization” (2009). Central to this theoretical approach is questioning how and why problems come to be understood as truths, and ultimately, what the implications of this might be for the governance of social life. This study was completed in Spring 2018 at a large research-intensive university in Ontario and included document analysis and semi-structured interviews. Six main policy documents were analyzed, including documents from both institutional, governance, and research-based sources, and seven staff in the university’s central SAS unit participated in interviews. Findings Four main themes emerged from this study of policy discourses, student skills development, and SAS: skills development articulation, bringing attention to the connections between student skills development and student mental health, access and equity, and the creation of a binary of the “real world” and the university, which is the focus for this article. While presented separately, these themes are deeply interconnected and tangled in their complexities. COMMUNIQUÉ / VOLUME 20 / ISSUE 1 / SPRING 2020 / 35
