If you go to university, you will probably....

Something I wrote on my holidays

If you go to university, you will probably....

 

Enjoy your course

• The 2011 National Student Survey reported that 83% of students were satisfied with the quality of their course
• Most students also report that their course is intellectually stimulating, their lecturers enthusiastic and supportive and that their course has aided their own personal development

Get a paid job within six months

• 70% of UK domiciled graduates from 2009/10 were known to be working 6 months after graduation. 3% of those who were employed were voluntary or unpaid workers.
• Another 13.5% were in further study

Get a permanent job within six months

• 63% of UK graduates from 2009/10 working six months after graduation in the UK were on permanent contracts.
• 5% were freelancing
• 11% were on fixed-term contracts of more than a year (this latter includes newly-qualified doctors working as pre-registration house officers)

Get a graduate job within six months

• 63% of employed graduates from 2009/10 were working in ‘graduate-level’ jobs six months after graduate

So, it is worth going? Probably.

Anything else I ought to add to my list of 'probably's?

Graduate starting salaries not expected to fall

New small survey of graduate employers from Incomes Data Services today (full report costs £335).

Some observations. First the sample is 109 employers, so it's moderately sized, slightly larger than High Fliers, but not as big as the AGR's survey - although it's 3 months on, and the way the economy has been moving around, that's useful.

Second, unlike the AGR survey, IDS reports an increase in vacancies this year, but another year of no increase in salaries. Have thing changed that much since January, or does this just reflect sample differences? To be honest, it's more likely the latter. We're probably really going to see not much change in vacancies or starting salaries this year as things stand.

The median starting salary for graduates is quoted as £25,000, which, of course, it isn't. The median salary for graduates getting jobs at the large, mainly London-based organisations surveyed by IDS might be, but the median starting salary for graduates will probably be a hair below £20,000 this year, again.

It's also interesting that IDS are another organisation saying that graduate recruitment to the public sector will increase this year. Again, it might to the organisations the IDS are surveying, but to the public sector as a whole - I wouldn't bet on it.

The quote from Nasreen Rahman of IDS has an interesting insight:

“With economic sentiment picking up, employers are starting to expand their graduate programmes further, with some employers now re-opening schemes that had been put on ice during the downturn.”

...but with economic sentiment swinging like a pendulum (today's news from Ernst and Young is not terribly positive), we'll probably see more twists and turns before summer.

Graduates in the labour market

The ONS has just produced another report from the Labour Force Survey about graduates in the labour market.

The proportion of recent graduates - people who completed a degree or higher education qualification within the last six years - in 'lower skilled' jobs went up from 26.7% in 2001 to 35.9% in 2011

The unemployment rate for new graduates stood at 18.9 per cent in the final quarter of 2011. The rate is slightly lower than the peak of 20.7 per cent following the recent recession. It is also lower than the rate following the 1990’s recession when it peaked at 26.9 per cent in 1993.

The figures are interesting in broad terms, but problematic in detail.

First is the unemployment rate. This is actually the ratio of those unemployed to those who are employed. This is not a terribly good measure for recent graduates, because so many of them are doing something else (like studying or travelling), and so are not included in the calculation.

(Added 7th March: for the 2009/10 cohort, for example, 22% of graduates were doing things six months after graduation that mean they would not have been counted in the calculation. Most of them taking postgraduate courses.)

 That 18.9% in Q4 2011 figure looks even odder when you find that in Q2 2011 it was 18.4% but in Q3 it went down to 15.7% just when you'd expect it to go up with an influx of new graduates on the market. Very peculiar.

Later on the rate for graduates 2 to 4 years after graduation has gone down to 6.7% and for 4 to 6 years, it's at 4.4%.

I'm not sure what the early figures show, but the later ones seem to tell a story, as expected, of steady movement into employment - with the figures at 4-6 years only a little higher than they were pre-recession.

Now, on employment.

The proportion in 'lower skilled' roles went up with the recession (you can see it in the graphs with the report) and is coming down again.

However, the methodology is rather broad when it comes to considering whether role is 'skilled' or 'less skilled' (etc), and is further confused by a change in the occupational classification systems for the data from last year.

The specific change for the new SOC2010 is to reduce the number of jobs classified as 'managerial' (or, 'highly skilled' in this measurement) and to distribute them more appropriately in other job classes - which happen to be counted at lower skills levels, even though they're doing the same jobs in 2011 as they were in 2010. This makes the occupational classification system as a whole better - previously, it overestimated the number of people supposedly in management roles - but does obscure this particular measurement.

Overall, these absolute figures are probably not the most useful but the piece does tell a story - the recession had, and continues to have, a profound impression on the graduate jobs market, which has both upped the unemployment rate, and forced more graduates into less skilled jobs. And it has had a demonstrable affect even on graduates who left university well before the recession.

More graduates have also gone onto further study since the recession (of course, we were predicting this even before the downturn had become a real recession).

Looking at the data, it's difficult to escape the conclusion that we still have some way to go to a full recovery. It took around 5 years for the jobs market to recover fully from the 90's recession. 

We probably have at least 2 years, probably 3 or more, of this kind of graduate labour market to get through before we get back to where we were pre-recession.

But things are improving and the piece also shows more graduates than ever before in employment, even now.

Not as worrying a piece as it could be, but still plenty of food for thought.

(some edits on 7th March - I wrote the original in a bit of a rush - hopefully it makes more sense now)

Number of UG courses are down...but what about PG?

Last week, we saw stories suggesting a large fall in the number of undergraduate courses available to new students.

It's a pretty substantial drop, although we must stress the figures are disputed and it's difficult, thanks to the UK's laudably flexible system to get a very accurate figure with all the options of combined studies and so on, that are available.

But what of postgraduate study? Well, Graduate Prospects, of course, runs the National Postgraduate Database of PG course and study options, so we're in a position to have a stab at examining how things have changed. We're still working on getting really accurate figures, but we think that between 2006/7 and 2011/12, the number of PG courses available has gone up appreciably, with almost the whole rise in business and finance ( the number of courses available in the arts and in STEM seems to have held relatively steady).

In a way, this is unsurprising - we predicted a rise in PG enrolments as downturn became recession, and we were right about that, so with more students, you might expect more diversity. But it's still interesting, and begs a number of questions about whether this will be sustained, what this means for students and how this feeds into the ongoing and very timely debate on postgraduate provision.

Unemployment again

Is it really that long since I posted? As many readers know I'm working on a magnum opus on regional graduate employment, and in case you didn't then, hi, sorry for not posting, I'm working on a huge report on regional graduate employment. It's going to be really good. Also, long.

Anyway, I just had a chat with a journalist from a national newspaper (that's not unusual in itself) about the new figures produced by the ONS on youth unemployment.

They, rightly, wondered if there was more to the figures showing the unemployment rate for graduates being similar to those leaving school with A levels than meets the eye. There is, of course, something which has passed some other journalists by.

It's all very well quoting a rather unhelpful figure for how what proportion of graduates don't have something sorted out the day they leave university, but it doesn't really address  the real state of the graduate jobs market, as I pointed out last year when similar figures came out (and anyway, rather a lot of graduates aren't 21 when they leave, so even the figure of 24.8% quoted - not, incidentally, the same as the figure of 25.9% for young people with only a GCSE, despite what you might read - isn't giving a real picture of anything much for graduates.

Then, there's the question of how big that cohort of A level students who don't go to university actually is, and what they're doing if they're not signing on.

We lack firm data about what proportion of graduates in the past had something arranged on leaving university. We don't know if three quarters already having something lined up (let's gloss over those people not working on graduation, but due to start in the autumn) is high or low. We do know that destination data shows that a sizeable majority of those out of work at graduation will get jobs over the next few months.

We also know, from the very ONS report being quoted, that the medium term outlook for graduates is far better than for other qualifications.

The job prospects for graduates are not the same as for people with lower qualifications. Always read the full report (and this one's only 7 pages, including appendices. Large type.)

High Fliers

The HighFliers report is out today, so here's a summary.

First, let’s start by pointing out that the survey covers only the Times Top 100 employers and so is only really a snapshot sample of well-known graduate employers and shouldn't be taken as representative of all employers. But it is interesting for all that and, after all, covers the employers that students themselves find the most popular, so gives an important picture of those organisations and schemes that students are likely to apply to this year

The bottom line is that the employers covered are expecting, overall, to be offering more jobs than last year – a very welcome finding. It’s not evenly spread, though – reports of recovery in engineering and IT seem to be substantiated by the finding that the firms in these sectors look to be upping recruitment. 

The Armed Forces are, not surprisingly, cutting recruitment, as are media, law and some professional services – although that may be because the latter recruited heavily last year.

Much of the press coverage has focussed on the report that half the recruiters interviewed have warned that graduates with no work experience will struggle to get selected. High Fliers haven’t actually stated that the employers want this experience to be ‘relevant’ or even necessarily at graduate level. The kind of experience students gain in term-time and vacation working is often very valuable, and there's no indication that employers aren't interested in experiences of this kind.

The 100 employers covered are collectively offering 11,296 paid work experience and internship places this year as well, so there are chances for students to gain experience before applying. Nevertheless, it's not a good time to be graduating with a thin CV and this provides a timely reminder to students that they need to have something to show on there to stand a good chance of a job on graduation.

84% of the recruiters interviewed have vacancies available in London, but more than half also have jobs in the North West and the Midlands. 62% expect to have jobs in finance, 57% in IT, and 40% in HR.

There is a section on salaries, but unfortunately because of the small sample size and focus on popular employers, investment banking tends to drag the overall average up to a level that isn't reflective of the graduate jobs market as a whole. There’s an interesting rundown of average salary by sector, and it seems that in most sectors, starting salaries remain flat.

We also have a rundown of applicant volumes, with many surveyed employers expecting more applications per vacancy this year.

Overall, I'm not dancing a merry jig with delight at the findings, but nor are we looking at a graduate jobs meltdown. The graduate employment market, judging by this sample, appears to be very slightly better than last year, albeit with the caveat that some very popular sectors, most notably media, may be even harder to get into than in the past. Other sectors are looking to expand and there are signs of the long-awaited recovery in engineering and IT.

I have to finish with an amusing direct quote:

“Just one sector – IT & telecommunications – has had a drop in applications so far this year, with an average of a fifth fewer applicants than in 2010-2011. Two recruiters from the sector commented that although the volume of applications had decreased, the quality of candidates had improved.”

Yes, I know n=2 is hardly the whole sector, but it's an interesting counterpoint to current criticism of IT teaching.

Happy New Year - and something from last month

Hello everyone, nice to be back. No, really, it is. Hope you all had a good festive period.

Anyone interested in how I think 2012's graduate jobs market might look, as well as hearing how I sound when I have the 'flu, check out this excellent Guardian Careers podcast from last month.