The line on this year’s Graduate Outcomes data – which covers what 2023-24 graduates were doing 15 months on – is that things are bad, but not as bad as we might expect.
In isolation, graduate outcomes data mixes two signals: the wider state of the employment market for young people, and the specific value of a higher education qualification within that employment market.
The current weakness in graduate employment (just 57 per cent in – specifically – full time employment, down from 59 per cent) is notable – but still sits comfortably above what we might expect to see in a global recession. Indeed, the comparable figure was also 57 per cent for the 2019-20 academic year.
We know from this year’s Prospects survey (released at the same time) that graduates feel that AI is feeding this uncertain market, but it appears that economic uncertainty (including geopolitics and the idea that AI may one day start being useful) is the driver. Graduates are also reporting the use of auto-apply AI tools to generate and send applications, something that is slowing recruitment among employers deluged with passable-but-not-stellar applications.
The continuing pattern that is arguably of greater concern is the response rate, which now sits at just 32 per cent of the cohort making a complete response (down from 35 per cent last year and 39 per cent in 2022-23). While HESA research does demonstrate that response bias doesn’t undermine our sensitive interpretation of the data, and Graduate Outcomes holds Official Statistics designation (unlike, say, the Labour Force Survey) it is worth bearing in mind.
Trends and socio-economics
Graduates from disadvantaged backgrounds struggle, comparatively, to secure the employment opportunities that their better-off peers can access. And they tend to be more affected by economic headwinds, so it is notable that the released data demonstrates that full time employment rates are falling right across the board – the underlying concerns about employment among young people (as Alan Milburn noted recently) are affecting graduate recruitment right across the piece.
We’re also seeing a collapse in further study among first degree graduates. Typically this has been counter-cyclical – so more young people enter further study when there are less jobs around. Again, this is usually linked to socio-economic background – and again, proportions are falling across the board.
What are graduates doing instead? Part-time employment proportions are up, as are non-employment destinations like caring responsibilities, travel, and unemployment. The latter sits at nearly 9 per cent for the most deprived quintile of first degree graduates, and at nearly five and a half percent among the least quintile.
At provider level
I’m not a fan, as most know, of using mission groups as a proxy for types of providers. But it has become common to use it as a proxy for the “value” of higher education – everyone claims to know, for instance, that a “better” university will get you a better job. It is entirely possible that, in the recent past, the type of student who usually went to elite providers would get a decent job anyway – and that any difference wasn’t down to anything the providers themselves were doing.
Recent expansion at the top end of the market was inevitably going to change this statistic at some level, but what is really notable about this plot is that the downturn in graduate recruitment seems to be applying across most of the sector. The only group of providers where more graduates landed highly skilled employment (that’s the OfS/ONS definition using the top three SOC groups) is Million Plus. And the huge declines have been in the – often very vocational – independent end of the sector.
“Highly skilled” is just one definition of a good graduate outcomes – and we should be equally glad to see graduates using what they have learned, feeling like their work is meaningful, and feeling like they are on the career path they want to be on. Happily Graduate Outcomes asks those very question: and I’ve plotted them against the “highly skilled outcome” (both using proportions of responding graduates) for UK graduates at all levels in full time employment.
What this plot tells me is that skilled work doesn’t necessarily make for content graduates, but (for larger providers at least) there is a close correlation for fitting with future plans, with rather less of a link to meaning or using what a graduate learned during study. More working Worcester graduates report that they are using what they have learned in their work than Manchester graduates: and they are also more likely to be in high skilled employment. Perhaps not what you might expect.
Because SOC “highly skilled” is so important to regulators, here’s a plot letting you look at how your provider’s performance has changed over the years.
Activity time
Full-time employment is one very visible goal for a lot of graduates – so which provider is best at getting you into work 15 months on? Counting only providers with meaningful data (more than 50 graduates with known outcomes, where these are more than 25 per cent of graduates) gives us an answer: if you want a job, study at Harper Adams.
Pausing only briefly to remember that past performance is no guarantee of future success, we can also do similar things by subject area within providers. Want to study psychology and get a job afterwards? De Montfort. Fancy media or journalism? Leeds. For law it makes sense to include significant interim study – to work as a solicitor or barrister there’s another qualification to do. Even so, the provider getting its law students into work is Buckinghamshire New.
This exercise should demonstrate that subject of study has a significant impact on your post-graduation career, so I’ve refactored the data to let you look at all subjects within a given provider.
By default this looks at the sector as a whole – we can see that vets and medics are most likely to be in full time work, with artists and a tiny cohort of polymaths at the other end. We can also invert the telescope – the subject of study most likely to lead specifically to unemployment is computing, and that isn’t even close. Nearly 10 per cent of computing undergraduates are unemployed 15 months after graduation
There’s always a lot of talk about generative AI when we think about graduate jobs – and for me the area of work that has seen the most enthusiastic early adoption of that kind of technology is coding and software development. But this unemployment trend extends back to those halcyon days before ChatGPT and Claude, so perhaps the relationship isn’t as clear cut.
Industry
Subject of study and industry of employment don’t always link neatly. Apart from anything else, there are many jobs required in pretty much any industry. But it is always tempting look at particular industries in flux and consider the graduate supply – especially if you are sitting at a desk at Skills England.
First up, here’s a look at which industries are more likely to employ graduates in skilled roles (yes, it’s the SIC-SOC plot).
There are some industries – transportation, trade, care – that are unlikely to employ graduates in roles that OfS deems “highly skilled”, so if your provider specialises preparing graduates for these valuable and likely underappreciated industries it would struggle to perform well.
So let’s bring in some provider level on industry of employment. This doesn’t look at skilled roles – we don’t get a data split that does that – but offers facts like the 500 (36 per cent of all graduates in employment) University of Staffordshire graduates work in public administration while a comparable number of University of Bristol graduates (500, 30.4 per cent) working professional, scientific, and technical roles.
Complexity
Graduate Outcomes data can always be used to tell simplistic narratives – you won’t need to look far to see people parlaying a small drop in employment rates into a pre-prepared solution that universities are terrible and/or robots are taking all the jobs.
But if you analyse the data in a bit more depth, there are any number of surprising stories that can – and should – change people’s minds about value, what a “good destination” is, and what university is and is for.
Things are very difficult now for young people looking for employment – they have been difficult before, even though the circumstances do not exactly match. But it remains true that a degree is a better deal than no degree for anyone looking to find work, and very little is likely to change that.
