Editorial Practice-bounded Knowledge

Where vocational subjects are taught in universities the balance between education and skill-development is rarely likely to be stable. Academics and practitioners work to different incentives created by organisations that are trying to optimise very different goals. The more well-established a subject becomes as an academic endeavour, the greater the risk of divergence between skills and educational agenda. The process of curriculum adjustment can be slow and insensitive to demands in the work place, especially where universities are not obliged (by regulation, contract or competition) to deliver graduates with specific minimum skills (see below). Where the gap between graduate qualities supplied and graduate qualities demanded becomes large enough (call it the graduate quality gap- GQ-gap), something will give. There may be a crisis in the existing supply mechanisms, for example, desertion of undergraduates. More likely, for parents and students are informed to a greater extent by university marketing than professional debates, students will keep enrolling but find themselves less than optimally skilled and possibly at a disadvantage compared to graduates from other disciplines. The more powerful feedback mechanisms are likely to be the voice o