This article discusses the use of a pragmatic approach as the philosophical foundation of pedagogy in Finnish universities of applied sciences. It is presented that the mission of the universities of applied sciences falls into the interpretive paradigm of social sciences. This view is used as a starting point for a discussion about pragmatism in higher education. The Learning by Developing (LbD) action model is introduced, analyzed and compared to pragmatism. The paper concludes that, at least in practice‐oriented academic subjects, a pragmatic approach to pedagogy, as well as the LbD action model, is effective and could be considered in several universities as the basis of philosophy of pedagogy.

With the moderating power of the European Qualification Framework (EQF), European higher education has, for some time, been moving in a competenceoriented direction in some educational systems. The EQF is a competence framework that defines standards to all levels of qualification. The framework is set up to facilitate comparison of qualifications and qualifications' levels between and within different national educational systems. In this article, we are using the EQF to set the standards for the comparison between different higher education qualifications. The purpose is to reflect upon the differences of graduates with academically-oriented and professionally-oriented Master's degrees. We approach this problem by asking employers (survey, n 0134) and graduates (interviews, n030) for their opinion of how well the competence of academic and professional Master's degrees fit the objectives of the EQF level 7. Moreover, we are interested to explore how well the EQF lends itself to this kind of a comparison. The particular context for this study is the Finnish dual system of higher education.

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