The recent Education Select Committee report on Value for Money in Higher Education highlighted ONS statistics that “show that 49% of recent graduates were working in non-graduate roles”.
This statistic featured prominently in media coverage of the report and has been interpreted by many commentators to mean that universities in England are not providing value-for-money to at least half of their students and that too many people are entering higher education.
Is that the right interpretation?
I went back to the ONS analysis to find out more about what the statistic was actually measuring:
- A “graduate” is defined as “a person who is aged between 16 and 64 not currently enrolled on any educational course and who has a level of education above A-level standard”.
- A “recent graduate” is defined as “a graduate who left full-time education within five years of the survey date”.
- A “graduate job” is defined as those occupations identified as graduate jobs by academics at the University of Warwick based on their assessment of whether or not people in those occupations “normally require knowledge and skills developed on a three-year university degree to enable them to perform the associated tasks competently”.
The ONS data includes a spreadsheet indicating which groups of occupations are considered to be graduate jobs and which are considered to be non-graduate jobs. This can be used to classify the 28,000 different occupations recognised by the ONS as either graduate or non-graduate jobs.
Combining this with the most recent Labour Force Survey data, 37% of all jobs are classified as “graduate jobs”:
| SOC category | Proportion of jobs classified as “graduate jobs” |
|---|---|
| 1 – Managers, directors and senior officials | 75% (2.6m graduate jobs) |
| 2 – Professional occupations | 100% (6.5m graduate jobs) |
| 3 – Associate professional and technical occupations | 53% (2.5m graduate jobs) |
| 4 – Administrative and secretarial occupations | 9% (0.3m graduate jobs) |
| 5 – Skilled trade occupations | 0% (no graduate jobs) |
| 6 – Caring, leisure and other service occupations | 3% (0.1m graduate jobs) |
| 7 – Sales and customer service occupations | 0% (no graduate jobs) |
| 8 – Process, plan and machine operatives | 0% (no graduate jobs) |
| 9 – Elementary occupations | 0% (no graduate jobs) |
| TOTAL | 37% (12.0m graduate jobs) |
So what does the ONS data tell us?
There are many anomalies in the classification, as it is not practical to classify all 28,000 occupations. A civil servant who was promoted from an Executive Officer [SOC 4112] to a Higher Executive Officer [SOC 3561] would be moving from a graduate job to a non-graduate job. Managing an off-licence [SOC 1190] is a graduate job, managing a pub or a wine bar [SOC 1224] is a non-graduate job. A singer [SOC 3413] is a graduate role, a dancer [SOC 3414] is a non-graduate role. A clown [SOC 3413] is a graduate job, the manager of a circus [SOC 1225] is a non-graduate job. And – my personal favourite – a rag-and-bone man [SOC 1255] is a graduate job, an antiques dealer [SOC 1254] is a non-graduate job. The list goes on and on.
And many jobs which are deemed by employers to require higher education qualifications are not classified as graduate jobs. For example, in order to practice as a paramedic – apparently a “non-graduate job” – the Health and Care Professions Council insists on new paramedics having an approved HE-level qualification in paramedic science. There are lots more examples, especially in associate professional and technical roles, where employers demand a higher education qualification for jobs the academics say do not need one and for occupations – including skilled trades – where higher apprenticeships have been developed.
Career progression routes for many occupations involve on-the-job training and experience in “non-graduate roles” during early careers so as to progress to “graduate jobs” after a few years. For example, the Civil Service Fast Stream recruits graduates to Higher Executive Officer (HEO) roles which are classified as “non-graduate jobs”.
Definitions and intentions
The statistics hinge on the particular definition used for what a graduate job is. For example, HESA Higher Education Leavers Statistics concludes that 74% of UK graduates who were in employment six months after graduation were in a professional job, and that this has been increasing over time.
A significant proportion of graduates working in “non-graduate” jobs are doing so out of choice rather than through an inability to find a “graduate job” (for example, many people temporarily prioritise flexible part-time work that is close to where they live when their children are very young over finding a job that fully utilises their skills) or are only doing so temporarily while between “graduate jobs”.
There is a difference between a degree being poor value-for-money from the perspective of an individual graduate and a degree being poor value-for-money from the perspective of society. Many jobs that are classified as “non-graduate jobs” demand that new entrants have higher education qualifications and attract an earnings premium compared to those occupations accessible to someone without a higher education qualification. Higher education therefore represents a good investment to these individuals: the critique is more that if a degree is not truly required to do the job then it is arguably a poor investment from society’s perspective.
Higher education provides more benefits to the individual and society than just occupational-specific knowledge. For example, given that those currently entering the labour market now are likely have to change occupation far more than previous generations did, the general skills obtained from a higher education qualification may be valuable in helping people be more resilient and flexible in retraining and adapting to rapid changes in economic structure.
What conclusions can we draw from all this?
The obvious one is that statements that half of recent graduates are in “non-graduate jobs” and the inferences often made from this that most graduates are getting poor value-for-money or that their degree is socially wasteful should be taken with a mine full of salt.
It is important to understand whether or not higher education qualifications are benefiting graduates over their careers in terms of whether the skills they develop allow them to do more highly-skilled work, be more effective and productive in their jobs and enjoy higher earnings than non-graduates with similar characteristics. However, simplistic interpretations of subjective data which has a lot of caveats and is based on the situation early on in a graduate’s career will lead to the wrong conclusions being drawn and the wrong policies being implemented.
Excellent article. I have always wondered about this. Classifications and perceptions need to change as we seek to make the population more flexible and resilient.
Brilliant to see this researched and articulated and a refreshing reflection in what we mean by graduate jobs and the value of higher education
Reminds me of this Seminar and the work of Francis Green & Golo Henseke – https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ier/news/what_is_graduate_job/
graduates cannot always find jobs in their elected vocation and many degrees that are not STEM do not lend themselves to an obvious follow on career. What is disappointing as somebody with a degree and in a technical occupation is that employers increasingly ask not for a degree but s diploma. It can be conjectured why this might be so but one obvious conclusion is that they do it to take qualified persons on at lower pay grades. Stop paying managers too much and the people that actually do the work too little
As a technical specialist with too many years experience of dealing with ‘recent graduate’ ‘technicians I’d say most of them were highly qualified but totally useless for at least the first six months, those that were taken on to improve the Universities employability stats, usually the most useless to outside employers, especially so.
Many employers want skills and experience, a diploma usually signifies some ‘real world’ experience, as one might have gained during a traditional apprenticeship, most ‘modern’ apprenticeships are not the same, something many graduates lack and the time it takes to gain that experience can be very costly for employers. There’s also the perception that recent and not so recent graduates are likely to be infected/indoctrinated with the worst of the student unions politics, even in STEM subjects due to the headline reports of political student protests, usually those studying STEM subjects don’t have time for such things but the excesses of those who do tend to stick to everyone.
Where can I get a degree in Clowning or Rag and Bonemanship?
Brilliant article which sheds some lights on a rather confusing and misleading topic
It looks like the ONS counts things differently to the DLHE KPI count, where paramedics are included as a professional/managerial role (previously listed as ‘graduate’), so still a bit confusing who is using what for what …
@dominic
DLHE counts every occupation in SOC 1-3 as a graduate job.
The alternative ONS measure discussed in this article only counts half of people in SOC 3 (associate professional and technical occupations) and three quarters of those in SOC 1 (Managers, Directors and Senior Officials) as doing graduate jobs, based on a study by academics that concluded that typically do not require a degree.
No doubt @registratism can tell you?
Really pleased to see this Seminar mentioned here, thanks Jaime!
Just further to the commentary in Peter’s article, identifying what is and isn’t a graduate job is really complex. Interestingly, although it looks like the ONS spreadsheet uses the SOC(HE) 2010 Elias & Purcell classification of graduate jobs, it doesn’t show why the decision was made – that’s why you get these bizarre distinctions that a singer is a grad job but a dancer is not.
The link to the Warwick paper has more information (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ier/futuretrack/findings/elias_purcell_soche_final.pdf). The paper describes how all 4-digit SOC occupations (and of course, there’s loads of variation within those categories too) were assigned scores for using HE knowledge on the job in relation to expertise, orchestration and communication aspects, on a scale of 1 (low) to 9 (high). So you get that SOC 3414 Dancers and choreographers score 5 on HE knowledge expertise, 1 on HE knowledge orchestration, and 5 on HE knowledge communication, while SOC 3415 Musicians score 7, 1 and 6 respectively – a slight difference, but one that means that dancers fall below the grad job cutoff (which has to be made somewhere in these types of classifications, although this raises the question of what is the purpose of such classifications in the first place).
Moreover, the Warwick paper shows the classification of graduate jobs into three types: expert, communicator and orchestrator (which relate to which type of knowledge expertise is predominantly used in the occupation) and ‘non-graduate’, while the ONS spreadsheet just makes the grad/non-grad distinction.
The Green and Henseke classification uses the Skills and Employment Survey series to create a ‘Graduate Skills Requirement’ index, and then uses the index to classify different jobs into graduate and non-graduate (see the paper for more info: https://izajolp.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40173-016-0070-0).
Reassuringly, one of the conclusions of the seminar was that graduate job classifications share more similarities than differences, so there’s something in there! You can see slides etc. from the Seminar here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ier/news/what_is_graduate_job/seminar_outputs/
@dasha
Thanks for outlining the process used by the Warwick academics in a bit more detail and highlighting other methodologies used in this area – there wasn’t space in the blog to expand much on how the assessment process academics have used to develop graduate job classifications.
As you say, it is a very difficult and complicated task. There are a broad range of jobs even within 4-digit SOC codes (which underpins many of the anomalies I identify in the piece). And there is inevitably some subjectivity in the classification and where the line is drawn between a graduate and a non-graduate job, with lots of borderline cases which could go either way.
My main point is that a lot more caution is required in interpreting the evidence than simplistic headlines about “half of graduates are in non-graduate roles” that these types of study attract. While you could argue higher education isn’t strictly speaking “necessary” for a particular role, it may well improve their effectiveness in that role to some degree. Higher skills may also be required later on in someone’s career even if not strictly necessary for their early-career roles. And there is also a significant element of choice involved e.g. main carers prioritising flexibility and a part-time job close to home over other job characteristics