DEMAND FOR NEW ‘EMPLOYABILITY STATEMENTS’ TRIGGERS PANIC AT UNI CAREERS CENTRES
The official body for university careers advisers has warned that proving each degree’s value to prospective students – a key recommendation of Lord Browne’s report – may be impossible.
Amidst the mayhem about the probable increase in tuition fees last week, you may have missed the fact that Browne’s review also included some tough talk for universities selling courses which promise more than they deliver.
The idea of ’employability statements’ is back. This brainwave has been kicking around for a while – and the specifics aren’t clear yet… But it seems likely that it will become compulsory for universities to issue statistics about the ‘destinations’ of graduates from each course they run. In other words, what happens to people once they’ve got this degree? Is it really worth the money?
It’s hoped that employability statements will help prospective students make better-informed decisions about which courses are wise investment – and which are daylight robbery.
But producing these figures may not be as simple as it seems – and could give university careers services a serious headache.
On Friday, the Association for Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS) announced that it had major concerns about the practicalities of publishing these numbers:
“AGCAS believes the Browne Report to be broadly progressive and welcomes its emphasis on informed decision making. However, it is concerned that some of the employability information and careers advice that it says is so important to prospective students, is not currently fit for purpose.”
“Currently universities collect and submit data on what graduates are doing six months after graduating. With many students postponing career decision making and job search until after graduation, and with an increasing number of employers and professions now expecting graduates to undergo a low-paid or unpaid internship or postgraduate training prior to a paid graduate position, the published figures are likely to mislead young people, their parents and their advisers.”
And Margaret Dane, AGCAS’ CEO, added her concerns to the mix:
“The review emphasises the importance of student choice and so it’s vitally important that we provide prospective students, current students and graduates with the information, advice and guidance they need to make informed choices. It’s partly about data and information but students also need advice and education so that each individual understands what they can do to increase their chances of success. Knowing what former students did is not enough and may be misleading as markets change.”
Regular visitors will be shocked to read this – but for once Graduate Fog agrees with AGCAS.
Lord Browne has just set the universities an enormous challenge.
Does a degree still set students up for a good career? And if it does, can they prove it?
Of course, I’m in favour of a degree’s ‘value’ being made more transparent to prospective students. I’m a fan of anything that stops young people spending huge sums of money on qualifications that they later realise are not valued by employers. But…
What happens after graduation is a messy business – and it is very difficult to measure.
Saying “Ninety per cent of students from this course were employed within six months of graduating” isn’t necessarily a boast. They could be flipping burgers.
Then again, if we define success as “doing a job related to their degree,” that won’t work either. Most history graduates never intended to become historians.
Then there are the graduates who go travelling or do a Masters because they can’t find work — how should we include them?
The poisonous culture of internships will also skew the results enormously. If a graduate is working full-time but earning less than the minimum wage, are they employed or unemployed?
I think the only helpful statistic would be the percentage of graduates who are employed in a permanent job that they enjoy — and are earning more than £25,000 a year. Lots of courses would close immediately — but at least we’d be telling young people the truth.
*Would employability statements have helped you decide on your degree?
Do you think universities will struggle to present accurate data to prospective students? Or do you fear that they could fiddle the figures, to make courses seem more valuable than they actually are?
I like a lot about Browne’s search for employability data.
It’ll change the “reasonable expectations” mindset of uni staff (course tutors, careers guidance staff, etc), employers and students alike. Over the last few years, it’s become socially acceptable for new grads to waste months (sometimes years)of their working lives hunting for elusive proper graduate jobs. In my view, this prolonged energy-draining waste of grads’ time shouldn’t be regarded as acceptable.
The employability data will encourage the unis and their paymasters to put far more resources into uni careers guidance / job search support than they do now. The support for every student should start as soon as they themselves begin their degree courses (eg short one to one meetings with careers guidance professionals during the first few weeks of the first term).
The data will encourage the unis to strengthen their ties with past alumni (potentially sources of jobs for present students) and with employers generally (eg those approaching the uni for help with research, relatives of students who happen to be high up in the corporate world and so on). Uni tutors have lots of useful contacts – they need to be encouraged to keep track of them systematically for the benefit of present and future students.
I’d like to see the 6 month stats amplified by further checks at 12 months and 36 months after graduation.
I truly wish that a transparent and accurate employability statement had been provided for each of the courses I was considering when choosing where and what to study! The information provided is deliberately vague and misleading, particularly to a 18 year old with little real knowledge of the job market or of career opportunities for graduates. The university I studied for my degree (Modern Languages) at currently has this statement on its website/prospectus regarding career opportunities:
“Recent graduates have gone on to gain employment in a variety of areas including business and commerce, finance, marketing, accountancy, law, the Civil Service, the media, charitable and non-governmental organisations, while others have remained in higher education to gain a teaching qualification or continue their studies at graduate level.”
Doesn’t that statement appear to be relevant to practically any and all graduates, regardless of the degree discipline studied? Couldn’t it actually be used to sell any sort of higher education qualification? It is an incredibly non-specific and opaque text and provides no real statistics, figures or information… additionally it has remained almost word for word identical for the past 7 years, throughout massive economic changes… This text paints a very positive if vague image of the destinations of graduates from this degree programme giving the impression that graduates are in demand and are successful in many fields. I know first hand that in reality most graduates from the degree programme are employed in badly paid clerical roles and are not using the skills and knowledge they gained and that most humanities graduates are in a similar situation i.e. not working in “a permanent job that they enjoy — and earning more than £25,000 a year” ; not what this text would suggest. Other universities teaching modern languages (and other humanities degrees) provide more vocational and professionally-oriented training and this is reflected in the jobs their graduates end up doing, but this information is so often obscured and lost in among the league tables, guides and university propaganda that young people are bombarded with. The fact that a university can get away with providing so little in the way of real employability information, based on and backed up by recent, relevant factual data is shocking. At the end of the day this sort of text is nothing but a deceitful marketing activity, designed to lull students into a false sense of security. Universities need to be more accountable in terms of the value of the services they provide and they clearly won’t do this without being legally required to. I understand that providing statistics and data on graduate destinations is troublesome but it really is the only way out of this culture of devalued degrees and graduate unemployment/underemployment.
@CareersPartnershipUK
I’m not quite clear – are you saying this is the universities’ fault? Or a collective failure… I know everyone thinks I’m all about bashing unis, but I do think that students should take more responsibility for their life after graduation too… I just think we could make it a whole lot more appealing by talking to them about careers in a way that is less boring / intimidating / uninspiring / overwhelming.
Hm, I suspect any careers advisers reading will be thinking – “Yeah, but how the hell are we meant to PAY for it??”
@Christopher
I agree – and I think it’s downright unethical.
Again, I agree – and I think the mismatch between the ‘promise’ and the reality is shameful. The only other industry i can think of that takes such a creative attitude towards the truth when selling hugely expensive products is… the beauty industry! And you know they’re now making mascara ads come with a warning along the lines of ‘false lashes have been used for this shoot – this product will not actually make yours look like this.”
Cosmetics and higher education are clearly very different kettles of fish (in fact, is this the first time EVER that they’ve been compared with one another??!) but the principle is the same. False advertising is NOT okay.
” False advertising is NOT okay.”
Exactly! And although it may be more difficult to prove that the way university degrees are sold amounts to false and deceitful advertising in comparison to the claims made by the manufacturers of cosmetic products which can often be tangibly demonstrated to be false, it is still essentially the same problem. Students are being sold an (expensive and labour-intensive) service which is supposed to lead to a certain outcome and increasingly this is just not true. I would be quite intrigued to find out what sort of policy the Advertising Standards Authority or other similar bodies apply to the way in which education is marketed….
Hi Tanya
Re: “Over the last few years, it’s become socially acceptable for new grads to waste months (sometimes years)of their working lives hunting for elusive proper graduate jobs. In my view, this prolonged energy-draining waste of grads’ time shouldn’t be regarded as acceptable”…. I regard graduate unemployment and under-employment as our collective failure.
As a society, I feel we should be putting a lot of effort into finding new ways for all of us (school leavers, career changers, those 50 plus etc) to earn a decent living. I don’t see this happening.
@Christopher
I agree – does anyone know how this works and whether we’d have any kind of a case?
Hi Tanya (again!)
Re: The employability data will encourage the unis and their paymasters to put far more resources into uni careers guidance / job search support than they do now…. Hm, I suspect any careers advisers reading will be thinking — “Yeah, but how the hell are we meant to PAY for it??”” We’ve a bad habit in the UK of being unwilling to pay for good analysis and planning; we prefer to “just get on with it” (whatever IT is and regardless of whether we’re charging off energetically in the wrong direction).
I’d like to see a re-balancing of expenditure – more money being spent helping people decide whether a university education’s the right way forward for them (and if so which subject they should be reading). Similarly, I’d like to see a lot more effort being made to ensure people receive an adequate return on their financial investment.
I’d be happy to see some re-jigging of university cost centres to ensure this extra careers guidance / job search support was delivered. Some of the extra support doesn’t even require new finance – just a change in behaviour by the career staff’s professional colleagues.
I finished my degree in 2007 and found that almost every job (even entry level jobs) all require work experience in order to even get to the interview stage. I only completed 2 weeks of work experience as part of my degree but that is not long enough. Universities should arrange for longer work experience to be part of degrees. It is wrong for universities to be taking so much money from students and not provide degrees that help graduates get a job. Universities have careers advisers which means that universities should be prepared to help their graduates get work, even if it means improving the content of degrees to make them employable. If they are not prepared to do this careers advisers become a waste of time. Universities providing employability information will encourage universities to help graduates get work and this can only be a good thing.
IMO, it’s not so much the value of the degree per se that people need to question, but what other factors (health, living circumstances, interests and background) may influence whether they’re able to translate those degrees into work. I can only speak for the industry I’m trained in but in media, most of the (few) paid entry-level jobs available are in regional newspapers or B2B titles. For the former, you need to be able to drive, for the latter, a background in economics/business/science/technology is usually desirable as B2B titles tend to deal with these areas. So while a journalism qualification is important and useful, it’s considerably less useful without the other things on top. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do a journalism course full stop, but that if you do one, you need to look at the fuller picture in thinking about how useful it’ll be. All this I’ve learned the hard way.
Obviously not every influential factor around a person’s employability will be apparent to them when they’re 18 (lots can change in 3 years and so on) but looking at your life as it stands and seeing how it’ll affect your job options (for better or worse) is definitely a good idea. Of course, not all 18-21 year-olds are that savvy, which is where the responsibility of the universities comes in. It’s not so much “false advertising” but not accounting for young people’s inherent lack of self-awareness and forward thinking.
I had no idea this was going to be the situation when I graduated. I just naturally assumed that a graduate level job would be achievable, based upon what I had always been told or led to believe during the first ten years of my working life.
It should be spelled out:
Want a REAL grad job? Like with PWC,Higher civil service?(If your not going to be a Doctor,Dentist or Lawyer.)
Then you NEED the UCCAS points and at least a 2:1 if not a first.(Need a internship to add to marketability BEFORE graduating and not after).
Not got any this before graduating?
Forget it.
Not went to a more highly rated university for those kinds of graduate jobs.
Forget it.
Not able to churn out applications that stand up against other candidates without needing to pull your hair out because it’s like or worse) than doing an essay or dissertation.
Forget it.
Cant bull your way through the selection process i.e interviews, assesment centres, psychometric tests?(The degree is ACTUALLY
a walk in the park for serious recruiters compared to that.)
Forget it.
Got too many health issues or complicated visible or hidden disability issues?
Forget it.
Not willing or easily able to or comfortable with moving to somewhere like London or even leaving the UK altogether?
FORGET IT!!!
Perhaps the American SATS do provide after all at least a more honest way of indicating whose going to get a return on investment from higher education and whose going to be sold a pig in poke!
Those who I have described elsewhere as being in the do gooding industry where diversity and disability is concerned should be summarily WARNED!!
The least said about university career services themselves the BETTER!