Missing values: engaging the value of higher education and implications for future measurements

Finding a conceptually informed and substantive means of understanding the value of higher education (HE) remains a challenging but crucial issue in the context of continued market-orientated policies. This article offers a way forward and posits that formal approaches to measuring the value of HE can only have currency if engaging in longer-term and sustainable notions of value given that many of the benefits of HE are manifest in less tangible, non-immediate and non-monetary outcomes. Capability perspectives are drawn upon better to capture the more developmental and longer-term value potentiality of a university education. We explicitly refer to three key spheres of value pertaining to personal, social and economic milieus that may be derived from HE. This approach moves beyond the utilitarian gain approach to value popularised in recent HE policy, in particular the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework. Instead, it brings into play the significance of agency and selfhood as key value dimensions, and a broader conception of working life. The implications for engaging with future measurements of the value of HE are also discussed.