ABSTRACT
The irresistible rise of transferable skills? There does indeed appear to be some quality of irresistibility about the increasing attention being paid to the notion that higher education can and should enable students to develop abilities which are in some way transferable to contexts separate from the subject discipline studied. Over a decade ago, the old NAB (National Advisory Board for Public Sector Higher Education) and the University Grants Committee (UGC) endorsed such a view in a joint statement: 'The abilities most valued in industrial, commercial and professional life as well as in public and social administration are the transferable intellectual and social skills.' (NAB/ UGC, 1984).
