In global times, university education policy that holds the greatest promise for social responsibility is the focus here; the argument made is that such policy ought to be conceptualised using a normative human development and capabilities approach, drawing on the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Their ideas offer a values-based way of seeing higher education policy and development. Reasons are advanced for the necessary contribution of universities to the public good and to poverty reduction, while the contested purposes of universities are further outlined before human development and capabilities are presented for consideration as a superior approach to that of dominant reductionist human capital policies. The political dimension of policy development is acknowledged and explored to show that different normative frameworks generate different policies. The ideas are operationalised in relation to pedagogical arrangements and in the indexing of policy aims informed by human development, against pedagogies and graduate capabilities. (Contains 2 tables and 2 notes.)