Towards a parrhesiastic engagement with graduate employability

Graduate employability has become a central part of the policy debate on the relevance and value of higher education in Europe, often associated with meeting the economic demands of society. This has led to a sense of institutional vulnerability to the vagaries of market forces and public opinion, leading some higher education institutions to adopt narrow and reductive approaches to engaging with graduate employability in response. Yet such responses are not inevitable. This article deploys Foucault’s notion of parrhesia to argue that the vulnerability experienced by institutions represents an opportunity to engage with the truth of graduate employability. By conceiving of employability as the pursuit of self-transformation, institutions are able to induce students to problematise their own employability. In doing so, the possibility exists of disrupting narrow conceptions of employability and of opening up myriad possibilities of being.