What counts as a graduate outcome when the labour market is changing?

For decades, one of the simplest ways of explaining the value of higher education has been to point to what happens after graduation: whether someone gets a graduate job, how much they earn, and how quickly they enter the labour market.

These measures matter. Students quite reasonably expect higher education to improve their prospects, and universities should be accountable for ensuring that their students secure a role in the workplace once they graduate.

But there is a fundamental problem with treating the first destination after graduation as the definitive measure of higher education’s value. The transition into work is more complicated than that.

Same qualification, different opportunities

Alan Milburn’s Young people and work review provides backdrop to this debate.

It describes a labour market in which around one million 16-24-year-olds are not in education, employment or training (NEET). The report also argues that education’s role as a protective factor against labour-market detachment has weakened.

One particularly important implication is that graduate outcomes cannot be understood simply as a function of what happens inside a university. The report points to the importance of the ever-fluctuating labour-market demand, local economies and various links connecting education, skills and employment. It also notes that around 13 per cent of the NEET population hold a degree or other higher education qualification.

This undermines the notion that a qualification, by itself, is a sufficient protection against an uncertain labour market. It also brings us back to a question that has been present in higher education policy for some time: who gets access to the opportunities that result from a degree?

A graduating student can possess the same qualifications as their peers while having very different access to professional networks, work experience, mentoring, confidence in navigating recruitment processes and knowledge of what different careers actually look like.

The qualification may be the same, but the opportunity structure is not. The outcomes we struggle to measure consider a student who graduates without immediately securing a graduate-level role, but who leaves university with a professional network they did not previously possess, the confidence to approach employers, experience of working in an unfamiliar professional environment and a much clearer sense of how their skills might transfer between occupations.

Have they failed to achieve a positive graduate outcome? If we look only at their first destination, perhaps. If we look at their capacity to navigate the next decade of their working life, the answer looks rather different.

It reflects that some of the most consequential outcomes of higher education are difficult to capture in conventional graduate measures. This is where concepts such as resilience, adaptability, self-efficacy, social capital, and lifelong employability become vital. These should not become fashionable substitutes for employment statistics. Nor should universities use them to avoid difficult questions about the quality of provision or students’ employment prospects. Instead, they should sit alongside those measures and help us understand the mechanisms through which higher education contributes to longer-term outcomes.

The distinction is important. Employment is the outcome. Employability is, at least in part, a capacity. And in a labour market where people are likely to change roles, occupations and potentially careers multiple times, that capacity may become increasingly valuable. Social capital is not an optional extra. There is also an equity argument here.

Social capital is central

We often talk about widening participation as though the central question is whether someone gets through the university door.

But access to higher education does not automatically produce equal access to the networks and experiences that shape what happens afterwards. Some students arrive with parents, relatives or friends who can explain professional recruitment, recommend internships, introduce them to employers or simply reassure them that they belong in a particular environment.

Others must build that knowledge from scratch. This is why social capital should be treated as the central aspect of the employability process rather than as an optional enrichment activity. The challenge for universities is not to reproduce privileged networks, but to make access to useful networks open to all.

That means creating structured opportunities for students to encounter employers, practitioners, alumni, and professional communities. It means designing work experience so that it is accessible rather than assuming students can undertake unpaid opportunities around other commitments. And it means recognising that the confidence to use a network is itself something that can be developed.

The Milburn report reinforces the importance of thinking about opportunity in systemic rather than purely individual terms. The report argues that the problem of youth detachment cannot be solved by education, employment support, health services or welfare in isolation; the system needs to work more coherently around young people’s transitions.

Higher education is the engine that drives that system. From graduate outcomes to lifelong employability.

This raises a difficult question for policymakers. If we continue to judge higher education predominantly through relatively immediate employment outcomes, we risk encouraging institutions and students to optimise for the first job rather than the capacity to navigate a changing career. That would be particularly short-sighted in an age of AI.

The challenge is not simply that some existing jobs may disappear or that new technical skills will be required. It is that the boundaries between occupations are becoming less stable.

Graduates may need to learn new tools, reinterpret their professional identities, collaborate with technologies they did not encounter at university and move between sectors. In that environment, adaptability is not an optional add-on. It is an economic necessity.

Rethinking success

So might we need a broader conception of graduate success?

Rather than asking only whether a graduate secured a particular kind of job at a particular point in time, we could ask whether higher education has helped them develop the resources to navigate change.

Can they recognise and articulate their strengths? Can they build and use professional relationships? Can they learn new things when the demands of their occupation change? Can they recover from setbacks? Can they identify opportunities that they would previously have considered inaccessible? Can they make informed decisions about further learning, retraining and career transitions?

These are harder questions to measure. But difficulty of measurement should not be mistaken for lack of value. Indeed, the government’s move towards more flexible, modular higher education through the Lifelong Learning Entitlement reflects a growing recognition that education cannot be confined to a single transition at the beginning of adulthood.

Eligible learners will soon be able to use funding for shorter courses and modules as well as traditional degrees, explicitly supporting retraining and learning later in life. That shift makes the idea of lifelong employability particularly relevant. It’s a different conversation about value.

The cross-sector policy workshop we recently convened at Aston University brought together colleagues from higher education, industry, government, and the third sector to consider precisely these questions in the context of AI and labour-market change. One message came through strongly: no single organisation can manufacture a successful transition from education into work.

Find a way forward

Universities have an important responsibility.

So do employers, policymakers, charities, and other organisations that shape access to opportunity. And this changes the question we should be asking of higher education.

It is not simply: how many of your graduates got jobs? It is also: what did your graduates gain that helps them navigate the world of work? And perhaps, increasingly: who gained access to opportunities, networks, and experiences that they would not otherwise have had?

The answer to those questions will not make employment and earnings irrelevant. Far from it. Good jobs, decent pay, and economic security remain fundamental measures of whether education is delivering for individuals and society. But they are the end points of a much longer process.

As the labour market becomes less predictable, the value of higher education may increasingly lie not in guaranteeing a particular destination, but in expanding a person’s capacity to navigate the journey. That means developing knowledge and skills, certainly. But it also means confidence, agency, networks, adaptability, and the ability to keep learning.

The policy challenge is therefore not to abandon graduate outcomes. It is to develop a richer account of what sits behind them. Higher education should be judged not only by the jobs graduates obtain immediately after university, but by the opportunities it opens, the capabilities it builds, and the resilience it develops for the working lives that follow.

In an uncertain labour market, perhaps the most valuable graduate outcome is not having the whole career mapped out. It is being equipped to keep finding a way forward.