NEW SURVEY SHOCKS VAST MAJORITY OF LOW-EARNING GRADUATES
A new survey has shown that the average graduate salary is now £29,000 – leading Graduate Fog to ask where on earth the researchers found these high-rolling young people they polled. Most of the graduates we speak to are overjoyed if they’re offered anything above minimum wage.
It turns out, the number is a median (the middle value), not the mean (true average). But still, what the hell? Where are all these graduates with bulging wallets? Sure enough, the new statistics come from High Fliers, a market research company that questions only the graduates who went to work for high-paying employers in law, investment banking and oil and energy (including Allen & Overy, Deutsche Bank and BP). Ah. So that’ll be a tiny minority then.
For many months, Graduate Fog has questioned how accurate the supposedly official figures are about the true graduate unemployment situation. The last “average” graduate salary we heard of (from the AGR, in January 2012) was £26,000, which also raised our eyebrows. Our beloved universities minister David Willets is fond of telling us that, on average, graduates earn more than £100,000 more in a lifetime than non-graduates – although it turns out this is based on an ancient study which wasn’t very robust even then.
And apparently, most of your universities have an above-90% success rate, when it comes to getting you into work within six months of leaving university. Yet we know that hundreds of thousands of you are doing unpaid (or very low-paid) internships. Those of you on a proper salary tell us you feel lucky if you’re earning more than £20,000, even in London. Graduate Fog’s maths isn’t out strong suit, but does anyone else think these numbers doesn’t quite add up?
Thank God for Paul Mason, BBC Newsnight’s economics editor, who this week drew the Guardian’s readers to the reality of what’s going on. In his brilliant piece The graduates of 2012 will survive only in the cracks of our economy, Paul pointed out why the graduate problem isn’t just about a bunch of over-educated whingers – in fact you are everybody’s problem. A new generation which is finding they can’t get their careers started are proof of a “broken economic model”, he wrote. If you’re part of it, of course that’s tough to hear. But at least somebody is finally talking some sense about what’s really happening here. Now, perhaps our politicians will no longer be able to keep ignoring you – and might even do something to address the problem.
The High Fliers research also found that:
The UK’s leading graduate employers have increased their vacancies, for a third year running. But before you pop the champagne corks, the number only went up by 0.9%. In 2010 it rose by 12.6% and in 2011 by 2.8%.
Public sector employers have expanded their graduate intake by 20.8% in 2012. But again, manage your excitement levels please. This is an equivalent of just 400 jobs.
Employers in nine of 14 key industries are employing fewer graduates in 2012. Recruitment at the top consulting firms, investment banks and law firms have been reduced.
Seven out of 10 graduate employers now require applicants to have at least a 2.1 degree.
Applications for jobs have increased by 11% in 2012. Recruiters received an average of 52 applications for each of their new graduate vacancies. This makes application levels 25% higher than they were three years ago, which is put down to the large number of graduates from previous years who failed to find work at the end of their studies. Consumer goods manufacturers, banking and finance employers, retailers and investment banks received at least 80 applications per graduate position.
If you’re still reading, sorry if you’re depressed. It’s not our intention to be the Bad News Bear – really, it isn’t. But we DO think that if anything is going to be done to help job-hunting graduates find work, we need those in a position to do so to have the real facts at their fingertips. And saying that the average graduate salary is £29,000 is just plain ridiculous.
*ARE YOU EARNING £29,000?
Or are any of your friends? Do you agree that the graduate problem is far worse than the official statistics make it seem? Are you hopeful about finding well-paid work – or have you lowered your expectations about how much you’ll earn? Do you worry about how you’ll afford to buy a house and start a family in a few years’ time?
“here on earth the researchers found these high-rolling young people they polled.”
From their list of members – its here http://www.agr.org.uk/Members/Members.aspx
seems a fairly normal list to me.
“Most of the graduates we speak to are overjoyed if they’re offered anything above minimum wage.”
Its abundantly clear you move in different circles. You need to be talking to their members in order to gauge if their findings are representative. If you want to make a wider point about the wider market then you need to use different survey.
Graduate salaries do cover a broad range and this report is heavily skewed to the larger, London based, graduate scheme recruiters. Taken in a wider context when mixed with other graduate recruiters you will find salaries coming in at less than £29,000. Let’s not forget though that there are plenty of non-financial benefits that companies offer that graduates value.
It seems to me that many graduate jobs are in the southeast of England and that regions such as Yorkshire and Humberside have been largely abandoned, and are places where southern graduates are sent into exile as a punishment.
Back in the day when I was initially jobhunting for a graduate position, in 2008, the majority of graduate employers for humanities subject graduates, were offering placements in London and the Southeast with none in Yorkshire that I could hope to stand a chance of getting onto, and the remainder would be soul-destroying for me as a History graduate; at age 38, the prospect of relocating to the expensive Southeast did not fill my heart with joy and prospects without a Masters degree seemed uncertain. In 2010, I met a group of graduates who were struggling to find even part-time low-paid jobs, some who had to make huge personal sacrifices to get a foot on the graduate careers ladder, or who found that their graduate job was a sham and had to step off the ladder to retrain, again at a huge financial sacrifice.
Manvers, Rotherham, in the Dearne Valley of South Yorkshire, has become a blackhole for a small number of desperate graduates and even postgraduates. Once a part of the industrial heartland of Hallamshire, it has been gradually expanding since the early 1990s and today is occupied by a host of outsourcing callcentres providing low-paid ‘permanent’ and temporary Customer Service Advisor jobs. The average hourly rate is £6.50, based upon the two large callcentres I worked at in late 2011 and 2012, as well as closely following the vacancies advertised. A person who managed to stay at a callcentre for a year could expect an annual basic salary between £12600 and £13600.
However, the money is not everything for graduates. When I took my first non-graduate callcentre job in 2008, I was concerned that I would be damaging my graduate prospects because I was not building up graduate employment experience. A postgraduate I spoke to in late 2011 had moved to the UK in order to complete her studies in medicine, and suddenly discovered that the NHS had stopped recruiting in that field, was concerned also that graduate employers would look upon her unfavourably because she was accepting work outside her field. So was she expected to take minimum-wage jobs as a Care Assistant at a private nursing home, even though callcentre work offered ‘better’ pay and meant less personal sacrifice?
But, I think I’ve written more than enough for now…
It’s not worth doing a degree now. Unless perhaps you’re in Scotland (where I got mine), and even then you’d better make sure and do a ‘good’ degree and get some relevant work experience. Even then….. we get upward of 34 job applications from India and China per day. The size of their universities are the same size as some of our cities! It can’t end well..!
Lack of job certainty and lots of student debt. Not good. Did anybody see this?
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/4422455/Pimlico-Plumbers-colleagues-reveal-their-salaries-for-Channel-4-show-Show-Me-Your-Money.html
If you can’t earn that you wasted time doing a degree that is not of value to society. Maybe to you but not society.
The last government have a lot to answer for mind by duping people into believing a degree was the golden ticket and everyone would have one. Now all and sundry have a degree it is no surprise salaries are nothing special for most. Wake up and smell the coffee!
@Dave. So firstly, what you are saying is that universities up and down are wasting everyone’s time by having certain courses on their prospectus. Well, for your information, certain ‘useful’ sectors were affected quite hard by the Great Recession of 2008-09, including civil engineering, I.T. graduates and Business Studies graduates were running at about 11% unemployment.
Secondly, Tony Blair correctly recognised in the mid-1990s that the key to lifting people out of poverty and develop a high-skilled society was through education. The Labour Party democratized Higher Education through the introduction of the Student Loan system. Free tuition for the large numbers envisioned would not be sustainable. The scheme gave the opportunity to go to university for many young people who were the first generation in their family to go to university.
No one could predict that 10 years after the election of Tony Blair that the world would experience the worst global recession since the 1930s. Government response to the current crisis should be to continue to provide loans to undergraduates regardless of which degree they are taking.
@Dave. Every degree is worthwhile and if someone hasn’t had a graduate job since graduating, it doesn’t not diminish the value of the degree.
A university degree does not necessarily equal well educated. The whole idea of 50% studying middle eastern studies for 3 years is nonsense and a calculated move to reduce the unemployment figures.
IBM Grads back in 2010 (200 ish) all started on at least £27 k, and now they start on £30.
I’m hitting 50k now. Friend of mine in the oil sector is hitting 90k. Guess his line of engineering pays better (and I’m looking to get in)!
Brian – I agree it is good to have the opportunity to go to uni. I got free education in Scotland and was the first in my family to go. It was the best decision ever and I’m privileged to have gone. However not all degrees are useful, the 50% target was a joke, and Labour did in fact bring this country to its knees (as they always have done) – not that the Tories have done any better.
This article is not making any sense. In a sample of 100 people where 90 make 20k and 10 people make 50k the median would be 20k and the mean would be 23k. So pray tell, how is the median “inflating” the value?