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When graduates return home – then what?
I don’t usually pay much attention to the kind of random surveys that people email me in the hope of coverage, but every once in a while I spot one that piques my interest.
Careers firm Invicta Via commissioned Research Without Barriers to survey 1,003 UK parents of children aged 18 and above who live at home on the way they support their child into employment.
I’m not a huge fan of the structure of the questions – the “headline” finding is that parents are pretty evenly split as to whether or not university was the best option for their child, but at the top level this doesn’t take any account of what the child in question actually did. You have to drill into the tables to find that 87 per cent of parents of children with a degree as a highest qualification thought university was the best choice, rising to 95 per cent for parents of holders of higher degrees.
The parents who feel that not applying to university was the best thing for their children tended to be those with children who held either very vocational (for example apprenticeships or BTECS) or Level 2 (such as GCSEs) qualifications as their highest qualification.
In other words, people tend to believe that what their child chose to do was the best thing for them. Which is not unexpected, but kind of lovely given that parents likely fed into that decision.
What’s more interesting to me is the evidence of support for graduate children living at home in applying for work. Some 50 per cent of parents of graduates living at home reported helping with putting together a CV, nearly 40 per cent helped in the application process itself, and 44 per cent picked out what their child should wear for a job interview.
And 49 per cent encouraged their child to apply for a job vacancy the parent had found.
This all rather feels like stuff that university careers services should have covered, or be offering active support on. I know in many cases careers services are looking to offer post-graduation support, which makes me wish that these parents had been asked about encouraging engagement with these.
To be clear this is a sub-sample of 198 parents (the proportions are similar for higher degrees, but the sample size there is just 58). Again, we are brushing up against the survey design and sampling issues – 26 per cent of parents were financing or subsidising their unemployed graduate child, rising to 28 per cent for parents of young people with masters’ level or above qualifications.