Graduate Employment Rates: Too Good To Be True?

All shall have jobs

A couple of interesting stories about the challenging area of graduate employment have emerged recently.

University World News reports on suggestions of significant inflation of graduate employment rates in Shanghai with major differences between official data and universities’ own figures:

Universities in Shanghai have been taken to task for inflating graduate employment figures as the Shanghai City administration in cooperation with higher education institutions recently published its first report on the destination of recent graduates.

The first ever report on student employment covered the 2015 graduating cohort from Shanghai’s 17 universities and included employment rates for each institution. It claimed 95% of Shanghai graduates received job offers or went on to master’s degrees.

This compared to an overall employment rate for graduates in China at around 92% according to a report by the educational consultancy MyCOS Research Institute released in June. But some cities have suggested that unemployment rate for new graduates is nearer 84%.

Figures released this week by the Ministry of Education said more than 90% of Bachelor degree graduates from 75 universities found jobs in 2015. In part the ministry said this was due to more ‘flexible’ employment including self-employment and launching start-ups. Meanwhile, only two universities saw employment rates below 90% for masters’ graduates according to annual reports on employment released by the universities and cited by the ministry.

With graduate unemployment an annual concern in China as some 7.5 million students graduated in 2014, 260,000 more than in 2014 – the high graduate employment figures for Shanghai have been regarded with disbelief. The city’s employment market is particularly competitive for new graduates.

“I think it is safe to presume that these figures have been inflated. Indeed statistics from Shanghai Education Committee posted in June of 2015 suggested that among the 177,000 undergraduates in this city, only 62.4% had found work or been accepted into a master’s programme,” according to Huang Lanlan an education commentator for the Global Times.

While there have been questions from time to time about the DLHE methodology, which reports on graduate destinations in the UK, they have never been quite as significant as this.

The course with a money-back guarantee

Meanwhile, in the US, everyone’s favourite disruptor, Udacity, announced a course which guarantees graduates a job in their field within six months – or, as the Chronicle reports, they get their money back. But there are plenty of exemptions:

The promise is being offered only to students who enroll in Udacity programs that teach the most marketable skills: machine-learning engineer, Android developer, iOS developer, and senior web developer. And students must complete the courses, something a vast majority of the four million students enrolled by Udacity do not accomplish.

Students who want the money-back guarantee must also pay an extra $100 a month for that piece of mind, remitting a total of $299 a month until they finish the course. For most students, it takes six to eight months of working 10 hours a week to complete a program, said Udacity’s chief executive, Sebastian Thrun, in an interview this week.

There is also no guaranteed benchmark salary, although Mr. Thrun said the positions are “real” jobs — “not jobs as a Starbucks barista.”

This is though really just a “crisper” way to recruit students as Sebastian Thrun, the ever-quotable chief executive of Udacity sees it.

Let’s not forget that this organisation is fundamentally concerned with bringing about the demise of the dinosaurs of traditional higher education: Thrun predicted a while ago that there would only be ten universities left in the world in 50 years. Things still moving in the wrong direction on that prediction but it is early days.

There are, of course, huge caveats about this so-called guarantee as the Chronicle piece points out. And to take advantage of these very specific conditions students do have to make what looks like an insurance payment too.

All very crisp. But perhaps there is something in it? After all, there are plenty of examples in the UK now of company sponsored degree courses which guarantee jobs at the end (usually in accountancy), and the armed forces have been sponsoring students through degrees with guaranteed careers at the other end for a very long time.

We wait to see if it catches on. Perhaps it’s not that novel an idea though. But that never seems to stop those cheeky disruptive types.