Professor Hugh Lauder

Professor of Education and Political Economy

Hugh Lauder is a leading international researcher in education and the global economy. His book with Phillip Brown and David Ashton, The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs and Income, has received widespread global attention from academics and policy makers.

He completed his Doctorate from the University of Canterbury (NZ) in 1983 and was appointed Inaugural Dean of the School of Education at Victoria University of Wellington in 1991, before coming to Bath in 1996 as Professor of Education and Political Economy.

For over a decade he has worked with his colleague at Cardiff, Professor Phillip Brown, on comparative studies of national skill formation systems and the global skill strategies of Transnational Companies.  His goal is to develop with Professor Brown an account of global education and the labour market. The Global Auction is the first of three related books on the topic.

He says, ‘we take the idea of the knowledge economy as a myth because the demand for graduate labour in the west has been over estimated; it has failed to take into account that companies are seeking to reduce the cost of brainpower, either by offshoring graduate jobs to cheaper locations or by substituting technology for higher skilled work’. He acknowledges that such a view challenges the dominant  assumptions, made for example, by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

It also poses problems for policy makers who have seen a policy of mass higher education as addressing economic efficiency and competitiveness as well as issues of social justice. He says, ‘the solution is not to downsize higher education but to develop industrial policies that raise the demand for graduates. Seeking to downsize higher education is simply to join the race to the bottom’. 

During the course of their research a senior German policy maker noted, ‘we don’t trust the market: we pick winners’. That requires great skill but if countries like Britain and the United States are to change their economic fortunes, they will have to embrace economic strategies that seek to ‘govern the market’.

His work on global skill formation has been supported by the ESRC which has on two occasions rated his work as ‘outstanding’.  In addition, he is the editor of the Journal of Education and Work.

He has been a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education, London University and currently at the Universities of Witwatersrand in South Africa and Turku in Finland.