The flexible university: higher education and the global production of migrant labor

Abstract

This article demonstrates how neoliberal higher education has come to play a distinct role in the global market for migrant labor, where a growing number of developing nations educate its citizens for overseas work in order to maximize future monetary remittances. Located in the Philippines, this study shows how local colleges and universities attempt to impose an ideal notion of flexibility, quickly shifting academic manpower and resources to programs that would produce the ‘right’ types of workers to address foreign labor demands. Based on qualitative interviews with Filipino college educators and students, the article then discusses how such ‘flexible’ strategies undermine the job security of college faculty and lead to the constant restructuring of physical space within university campuses. Such changes negatively affect both students and teachers.

Keywords:

• Neoliberalism
• higher education
• flexibility
• marketization
• Philippines
• migration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. An exception is the growing literature on lifelong learning. Studies in this area have argued how notions of flexibility justify the need for individuals to continually upgrade their knowledge and skills in order to remain flexible for the new economy (see Gerrard 2015; Olssen 2006).

2. The expansion of higher education also led to a massive number of professionals who seek opportunities in popular migrant destination countries like the United States and the United Kingdom (see Brown, Lauder, and Ashton 2011). While the rise of elite universities in countries like Singapore and India signals rising competition for western graduates seeking coveted professional jobs, Philippine universities exhibit a more deliberate effort to fill labor gaps within receiving nations, in line with the state’s labor export policies. Of course, we can question whether the recruitment of migrant workers really does imply a true ‘lack’ within the host country. However, within Philippine institutions, the discourse in ‘educating for export’ is definitely driven by the desire to fill ‘labor gaps’ and not compete with native counterparts overseas.

3. Perceptions of fluctuating labor demands overseas create an unstable hierarchy of academic programs within the university. While I choose to focus only on Nursing and HRM, I observed that other programs had also gone through similar peaks and dips in ‘demand.’ While it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the experiences of students and faculty within these other programs, the issues I describe in this article are by no means limited to just Nursing and HRM. I provide a more detailed account of the particular experiences within the two programs in other publications based on this research (see Ortiga 2014, 2015).