Developing Graduate Attributes: Politics, Process and Assessment

In the last decade higher education in the Western world has been affected by a transformation that links education, productivity growth, long-term economic prosperity and human capital investment. This is exemplified in the creation of quality assurance measures and procedures that attempt to demonstrate to the government, employers and the general public that higher education is delivering employable graduates who have generic graduate attributes that are readily transferable to the professions. How these generic graduate attributes are to be taught, assessed and transferred to the workplace remains a matter of contention. As this book demonstrates, when, where, how and why these attributes are developed is something that all educators, policy makers and employers need to understand. The ten case studies of international graduate students in this book and the accompanying analysis of their progress in acquiring graduate attributes provide a convincing example of the complexity of this process and should be required reading for all academics, employers and anyone interested in current issues in higher education.