Plenty of Talent, Too Few Recognisers (“Bole”): How Higher Education Is Failing Its Graduates

Plenty of Talent, Too Few Recognisers (“Bole”): How Higher Education Is Failing Its Graduates

In classical Chinese thought, the proverb “a thousand-mile horse is common; a Bole who recognises it is rare” was never a lament about a lack of talent. It was a reminder that a system’s ability to see, place, and enable capability matters more than sheer ability alone.

As we enter the Year of the Horse, it is worth asking a contemporary version of the same question: are the roads we have built through higher education still worth travelling?

Today’s higher education systems produce graduates with more credentials, international exposure, and formal skills than at any point in history. Yet graduate outcomes increasingly feel uncertain, delayed, or misaligned. Too often, the question asked is whether graduates are employable, rather than whether the system itself is designed to recognise and absorb their capability in the first place.