Problematising the ‘job-ready graduate’ ideal in Australian higher education: new forms of exclusion in the academy

Abstract Employability agendas now pervade the higher education landscape of many Western nations. In Australia, employability as both a discourse and related set of practices has recently reached fever-pitch as a result of the Job-ready graduates policy reforms, which have generated an image of an ‘ideal’ job-ready graduate who selects a degree in the national interest and develops value-added industry skills throughout their studies. In this paper, we provide a critical appraisal of this ideal, examining the equity implications of the Job-ready graduates reforms by exploring who is included—and by extension, excluded—in the latest expectations placed on students. Drawing on interviews with 44 university students at one Australian public university, we generate three analytical categories to reflect the extent to which each student’s experiences align with the job-ready graduate ideal, characterised as ‘the ideal student,’ ‘the unequal student’ and ‘the excluded student.’ Elaborated through student-focused case studies, our analysis demonstrates how the job-ready graduate reforms ignore the social contexts of students, being implicitly coded with social class, gender, age, and dis/ability-based norms. We argue that the new regimes of employability espoused within the Job-ready graduates reforms stand in tension with longstanding commitments to widen participation in higher education, embedding privilege and further marginalising those historically excluded from the academy.