This article addresses the challenges that Garnett suggests face higher education through the lens of Bourdieu. In taking up the challenge set by Garnett for higher education in the knowledge economy and responding to its powerful and primary artefact--intellectual capital--the article reviews and uses the analytical tool of Bourdieu's practice in the context of work-based learning in higher education. The article suggests that the rivalry between the fields of higher education and employment weakens both in their attempt to appropriate values in a social field where intellectual capital is the main form of exchangeable capital. (Contains 7 notes.)