Is undergraduate research and inquiry suitable for bringing academic study programmes closer to the labour market?

Not every segment of the labour market integrates human labour in the same manner. Formal and content-related aspects of academic qualifications and their use in the labour market need to be differentiated. This paper explores the concept of using vocational requirements to infer a set of competences that educational processes should foster. In the students’ movement, students demanded opportunities to do undergraduate research and inquiry. However, this was not motivated by the wish to acquire advantages for the labour market, but rather by the desire to enhance their participation in social developments. The ways in which undergraduate research has been reinterpreted since the Bologna process make it clear that there has been an overly narrow focus on the specific vocational needs.