Abstract—Citizens are increasingly are provided with choice and customization in public services and this has now also become a key feature of higher education in terms of policy roll-outs on personal development planning (PDP) and more generally as part of the employability agenda. The goal here is to transform people, in this case graduates, into active, responsible citizen-workers. A key part of this rhetoric and logic is the inculcation of graduate attributes within students. However, there has also been a concern with the issue of student lack of engagement and perseverance with their studies. This paper sets out to explore some of these conceptions that link graduate attributes with citizenship as well as the notion of how identity is forged through the higher education process. Examples are drawn from a quality enhancement project that is being operated within the context of the Scottish higher education system. This is further framed within the wider context of competing and conflicting demands on higher education, exacerbated by the current worldwide economic climate. There are now pressures on students to develop their employability skills as well as their capacity to engage with global issues such as behavioural change in the light of environmental concerns. It is argued that these pressures, in effect, lead to a form of personalization that is concerned with how graduates develop their sense of identity as something that is engineered and re-engineered to meet these demands. Keywords—students, higher education, employability, knowledge, personal development I. INTRODUCTION HE policy discourse surrounding higher education is full of terms that invoke the agency of students – terms such as 'consumers', 'active learners', 'co-producers', 'partners', and the like all allude this connotation. However there is one discourse that has tended to dominate much of the higher education policy agenda in recent years and that is personalisation. Personalization and the personal have rapidly risen up the agenda within the pedagogical discourse of higher education. This is perhaps unsurprising a mass higher education system in which questions of questions of diversity, difference, and widening participation have taken centre stage. It is also arguable that this focus on the personal is an effective counter to the notion that mass higher education has brought with it mass teaching. However, it is also acknowledged that the notion of personalisation has been imported from the United States and has also associated with changes in a variety of sectors and services to include the notion of customisation. In this regard the users or customers are considered as of utmost importance in the way that products and services can be tailored to their requirements. J. Moir is at the University of Abertay Dundee, Scotland, U.K. Tel. +44 1382 308752; fax: +44 1382 308749; e-mail: j.moir@ abertay.ac.uk This is encapsulated in the notion of “mass customisation” in terms of the same large number of customers being reached in the mass markets of the industrial economy, and yet simultaneously being treated individually [1]. However, whilst the rhetoric of customisation is couched in terms of meeting individual customer needs there is also an underlying business drive to ensure that this serves to build up a lasting individual relationship with each customer and, thus, to increase customer loyalty and their purchasing power. The application of this commercial model to the new world of market-like public services has of meant a similar tailoring of services to meet individual users’ needs. However, in the world of education there has also been the application of a psychological perspective on personalisation that equates this with improved learning and motivation. The major pedagogical implication of such an approach is the adoption of measures designed to encourage students to be self-learning, self-actualising, and self-initiating. As with customisation, there is an assumption that a homogeneous offering is not sufficient in meeting students’ needs. The goal is therefore to employ pedagogies that meet these with an efficiency that is deliverable for a mass higher education system. Yet, despite the emphasis on meeting needs there is also a major driver behind the move towards personalisation: the explicit recognition that mass higher education has led to increased drop-out rates through some students failing to engage sufficiently with their programmes of study. The reasons for this are complex but it is clear that the drive to widen participation has been accompanied by corresponding retention rates. This in turn has led to a focus on the extent to which students can maintain a sustained effort over the course of their studies; their ability to preserve. Student persistence in ‘staying the course’ through to graduation cannot easily be pinned down to a narrow set of explanatory factors. There is also the problem of defining what we mean by ‘engagement’ and ‘persistence’ in today’s mass higher education context. Influential writers such as Ronald Barnett, suggest that the ‘will to learn’ is a key aspect of the student experience that needs to be encouraged and nurtured [2]. According to this view higher education need to focus on personal aspects such as authenticity, dispositions, inspiration, passion and spirit. Although, this is not a new idea perhaps what Barnett has drawn attention to more than others is how this process is related to an increasingly uncertain age. In this regard his work chimes to some extent with the zeitgeist of the times; an age of insecurity and risk, of individualism set in relation to appeals to the market-like structures and globalisation where these are valued in and of themselves as an ethic for guiding human action, of constant James Moir Students, Knowledge and Employability T World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Vol:6, No:4, 2012 422 International Scholarly and Scientific Research & Innovation 6(4) 2012 scholar.waset.org/1307-6892/12511 International Science Index, Humanities and Social Sciences Vol:6, No:4, 2012 waset.org/Publication/12511