The Tories want to build a website to help graduate employment according to THE:
A Conservative government would establish a web service designed to help students choose degree courses that are most likely to lead to a graduate-level job. Adam Afriyie, the Shadow Universities Minister, said that £5 million would be invested to establish a site that would “show people the number of students enrolled on a specific course and the number of job vacancies requesting graduates from these courses”. He said it would “enable students to gain a better understanding of graduate employment prospects”.
Whilst providing additional information about employment prospects to inform prospective students might be seen as helpful, this really is a pretty unrealistic proposition (most job adverts are not quite this specific), quite unnecessary given all the other data available and seems just a little overpriced. And we really do have enough league tables already, don’t we?
Actually this data is not all available from a single source. Nor is it as real time as this proposal aims to be. Anything that redirects potential students’ interest from popular and relatively easy courses to those that teach rarer and better paid skills is to be welcomed.
So too is the suggestion that while begining with the STEM subjects, the site would broaden out across disciplines, include volcational courses and eventually encompass later stage career changes as well as teenage course selection.
It strikes me as limited but well targetted state intervention that would greatly increase transparency in choice of education and training market, helping people make the best decisions that shape the rest of their lives. Surelt this is exactly the sort of useful thing the state ought to do?