A good graduate outcome is more than a SOC code and a salary

Good graduate destinations.

There are as many definitions of the term as there are, well, graduates – but for official purposes in England success is very carefully defined.

You need to be in what the Office for Students defines as a “graduate job”: within one of the top three SOC codes rather than the more nuanced “a job that graduates do” approach familiar from the Office for National Statistics. Or you need to be in further study – of any sort at any level. Or you can be travelling the world, caring for someone. Or retired.

OfS makes this measurement once – a scant 15 months or so after graduation – and this measure lingers on in your former provider’s regulatory data for four years. The latest TEF proposals also give you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to say whether or not you are using the skills your course taught you (15 months in), and take a single look at your average earnings (not even salary!) for the first three years after graduation.

These measures exist for purely regulatory purposes – and arguably are fundamentally flawed even for that! – but the definitions, as definitions tend to, appears to be bleeding across to policy making and public opinion around the value of degrees, subject areas, and providers more generally.

The latest report from the British Academy’s Higher Ground programme – What is a good graduate outcome and how do we measure it? – sketches out a more holistic approach that encompasses the quality of graduates’ working lives and the benefits they bring to wider society. Drawing on a wider range of data than is generally used in thinking about graduate outcomes, it makes the case for taking this broader approach to account for the underreported value the higher education system produces – covering aspects like volunteering, community engagement, and other potentially underacknowledged premiums.

The standard economic model starts with four quadrants, with one axis running from individual to societal, and the other encompassing economic and non-economic benefits in each domain.

For individual benefits, the Academy would prefer a wider focus on “good work” rather than a purely earnings or skills-category based approach. Job quality – along the lines of what is described by Scotland’s Fair Work framework – is beginning to emerge in sector data: HESA has added questions to the Graduate Outcomes questionnaire, and responses have now been embedded into DfE’s LEO data. The caveats are many: this is a single dimension, early career, self reported snapshot. While it is encouraging, it is a very first step in something that needs a lot more work to be useful.

A part of this value comes alongside a wider ambition: the ability to look at career trajectories rather than the more common early career snapshot. Longitudinal LEO data (currently extending up to 10 years after graduation) is available for a handful of cohorts, and as time passes more will arrive. The ability to track career volatility when it comes to earnings may offer a partial solution to LEO salary data’s most vexing failing: the inability to identify where a graduate might be working part-time. Here, the report recommends investigating linkage with the National Statistics Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings – a sample-based survey with its own problems concerning coverage, but with the potential to unlock data on job quality (alongside other large scale survey data) and earnings by occupation (SOC) as well as industry (SIC). This would help us substantiate smaller scale research findings and work from overseas, such as that graduates see a premium in their use of skills and autonomy, and job prospects, but no significant premium in their work intensity, as compared to non-graduates.

Of course, Skills England is already working on vocabularies and ontologies around skills matching – a means to identify where educational pathways are delivering the skills payload needed to succeed in particular roles and industries. This is a separate but linked issue that has already attracted regulatory attention (the addition of the single Graduate Outcomes “skills use question” to the recent OfS TEF proposals is a notable example) and could very usefully be expanded to cover more data points and allow comparisons between graduates and non-graduates.

But the fundamental point that comes through in this report (and was widely discussed in the round tables I attended for this project at the British Academy) is the absence of any consideration of broader societal outcomes in policymaking. We as a nation invest in higher education for wider economic and social benefits for everyone, not just the graduates involved – but these benefits are neither measured nor often discussed. We know from earlier British Academy research that there are many examples of graduates contributing to wider cultural and social infrastructure (things like community projects, libraries, advice services, arts activities) but we have no systemic way of measuring this. A 2019 literature review on this issue commissioned by the government found evidence of correlation between higher education and civic engagement, but was unable to be certain around causation. And 2025-26 polling finds that graduates are twelve percentage points more likely to engage in some form of civic activity than their non-graduate peers.

There is work too on graduate volunteering – with surveys suggesting that around 25 per cent of graduates (and a similar proportion of students) undertook voluntary work, and the proportions are higher for graduates than non-graduates. Clearly salary and time will be factors in these differences, but if a higher education qualification allows people to have the ability to contribute to the community in this way then it feels to me like we are looking at some form of causation. Likewise, the observable fact that graduates are more likely to work in the public sector than non-graduates suggests an element of public benefit that should be taken into account: as does less clear but still encouraging evidence of spillover benefits to health and education more widely.

The British Academy uses, in concert with all UK governments, the language of “inclusive growth” to describe a situation where the benefits of growth are felt by communities in all localities. It makes the point that these considerations – health and wellbeing improvements, community cohesion and resilience, and the welfare of future generations – are conspicuously absent from metrics related to higher education at the very moment when they are in the ascendent in every other area of policy.

We don’t have the evidence to say that graduates are a critical part of this growth, but we know that the infrastructure that makes up the connective tissue that underpins these goals is very much dependent on graduates and higher level skills. We are at the very start of a process of designing and collecting the evidence base that could define the future of government investment in higher education and thus the nation. It’s exciting stuff!