Academic taxi drivers in a global marketplace

In many countries there appears to be a considerable number of well-educated taxi drivers of foreign origin. Their number seems to have increased over the past 25 years. This observation, of course, leads to the question, why are they driving taxis and why don’t they have jobs corresponding to their level of education?

The answer is the insider-outsider mechanism formulated in the 1980s by the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck and his British colleague Dennis Snower.

They pointed to the fact that those inside a jobs market have market power over those outside the market, thereby putting up barriers to entry. This mechanism also operates among domestic citizens, but the effect is much more pronounced for immigrants.

It is thus a well-known fact that unemployment among immigrants is much higher than among nationals.

This is a general phenomenon due to language problems and cultural differences, but is even more marked when it comes to people with an academic education. While a carpenter, a car mechanic or a plumber can demonstrate her or his ability relatively easily, academics have more difficulties in doing so.

In contrast to tradespeople, academics are selected on the basis of their educational credentials. However, an often even more important factor appears to be the reputation of the institution from which they have graduated.

This reputation is to a large extent based on the success of earlier graduates in the national jobs market. Their success signals to prospective students where to go in order to have good careers and to employers which graduates they should hire. Thus again, Lindbeck and Snower’s idea of an insider-outsider mechanism seems to be at work.

And, if this is the fact in national labour markets for academic graduates, there is no wonder that immigrants with degrees from unknown institutions, irrespective of how prestigious they are in their home country, will have difficulties entering academic job markets in their new country, particularly where professional bodies are strong.

According to the above reasoning, the reputation of academic institutions is mainly constructed nationally, besides a small number of so-called world-class universities, which make up roughly the top 200 institutions in the global university rankings.

The rhetoric of internationalisation

The above may help us to understand why there are so many well-educated foreign taxi drivers all over the world. However, it might also have much wider implications for educational policies in modern institutions of higher education, since internationalisation has become the gospel of the leaders of such institutions.

They are often heard saying that their institutions compete on a global scale and that the education they offer is of world class and aims to attract the smartest students from around the world.

The rhetoric of internationalisation has, to a large extent, been reinforced in recent decades by the development of ranking systems. Business schools have, for quite some time, been ranked by publications such as Business Week and the Financial Times, and there are a number of rankings of whole universities such as those of the Times Higher Education and the Academic Ranking of World Universities.

Although these rankings are often subject to critical questioning, at the end of the day they are taken seriously, leading to the perception that there is a global market for education. As argued above, this idea is up for debate since the majority of higher education is national, or even local, with graduates going into national, or even local, labour markets.

The implication appears to be that leaders of academic institutions – maybe with the exception of those 200 so-called world-class universities – should care much more about their home markets than about global markets and they should reflect much more about their internationalisation strategies.

This is particularly the case in countries with nationals who speak a language of restricted global use. That has led to increased academic teaching in English in such countries, a change that is open to questioning. For there is no evidence that teachers communicate better in a language that is not their mother tongue. Neither is there any evidence that students understand things better in a foreign language.

These circumstances are particularly worrying since most students in institutions of higher education are recruited nationally and after graduation are likely to work in national labour markets. Therefore, it is extremely important that they learn the basic concepts of their studies in their mother tongue.

This does not mean that academic leaders should not think about internationalisation. Rather it implies that they should do so in another way than the way the ranking game has forced them to.

In so doing, they should concentrate more on preparing their national students for the globalised world we are living in. It is particularly important to add more knowledge from the humanities to students of other faculties, who would really benefit in their preparation for the globalised world from more education in foreign languages as well as in cultural matters.

Although English is spreading fast worldwide, graduates in the future are very likely to need to communicate in other languages with partners who do not hold Anglo-American world views. This is an important issue for university leaders to consider.

Taxis can be driven by people without academic degrees

In conclusion, it should be stressed that the arguments above do not imply a denial that we live in a globalised world. It is quite clear that modern communications both physically and electronically have created a more integrated world. As a result transnational relationships between individuals, corporations and other institutions have developed more and more.

However, at the same time there are also strong local cultural forces that moderate globalisation. Individuals communicate and travel, but they tend to be embedded in their local environments when it comes to family and culture. In the same way labour markets tend to favour locals, thereby leading to a waste of academic competence in the taxi industry.

In addition, the arguments above are an appeal to academic leaders to focus more on preparing their students for the domestic labour market. However, they are also a call for the development of new strategies to make students ready for transnational interactions.

Also, when foreign students are recruited, academic leaders should take a responsibility for the future career opportunities of their foreign students and not just look at them as a means of financing their institutions. We all need taxis on occasion, but taxis can also be driven by people without academic degrees.

Lars Engwall is professor emeritus, department of business studies, Uppsala University, Sweden. Email: lars.engwall@fek.uu.se.

Hans de Wit has issued a call to readers and contributors to University World News to send him their essays of between 800 and 1,200 words on what went well and what went wrong in internationalisation of higher education over the past 25 years. This is one of the essays he has received. He will select one essay to be published by University World News and at the end of 2019, will bring all these essays together in a book.