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Employability of University Graduates and Graduate Outcomes
Employability of University Graduates and Graduate Outcomes J Brennan, The Open University, London, UK ã 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction Graduate employment is a subject of frequent political and research attention these days. This is because presumed high levels of employability of graduates provides a large part of the justification for the massive expansion of higher education which has occurred in most developed and many developing countries over the last 20 years or so. This justification is twofold. First, the promise of well-paid employment fuels the social demand for higher education. Young people and their parents see higher education as the essential route toward the achievement or the maintenance of a good social position and lifestyle. Second, governments see the expansion of higher education and the consequent increase in the numbers of graduates in the labor market as essential prerequisites for a successful economy. Hence, state investment in higher education becomes a public good with high rates of social return. Claims in recent years about the arrival of the knowledge economy with its highlevel skills requirements have further accentuated the attention given to the second of these justifications and government targets for numbers of graduates in the labor force have been on the rise again. The two justifications rest on somewhat different assumptions about the importance of higher education qualifications in the labor market. The social demand justification requires only that there is a positional advantage gained from possession of a degree. All that is required is evidence that employers prefer – for whatever reasons – to recruit and reward graduates more generously than people with lesser or no qualifications. However, the justification for greater state investment requires the additional assumption that graduates are recruited by employers because they will bring greater productivity to the enterprise and therefore to the economy and hence greater wealth to the nation. The greater productivity may be the result of the knowledge and skills acquired within higher education – the human capital argument; or it may be the result of the selectiveness of higher education institutions in identifying able young people – the screening argument. Or there may be no productivity at all with selection criteria for higher education entrance reflecting personal, social, and educational characteristics of little relevance to the workplace. The latter would still provide positional advantage to the graduates in terms of getting a job, but it would not bring the economic growth associated with greater productivity in doing the job.
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In expanded systems of higher education, with in many cases well over 30% of the age group entering higher education, the selection or screening hypothesis becomes less plausible. Graduates can no longer be considered to constitute an elite. Thus, their greater employability must be seen to rest in the knowledge, skills, and competences they have acquired through higher education rather than through some set of innate qualities. Yet, the elite conceptions of graduates die hard. Much research has been commissioned to determine whether graduates are getting jobs at all and, if so, whether these jobs are of a suitable graduate level. Since expansion of higher education implies that graduates will be entering new areas of the labor market, it becomes difficult to define graduate level and several typologies have been produced to represent different levels of employment, with some clearly regarded as being superior to others. The next section of this article summarizes what we know about the kind of employment obtained by graduates. The following section considers the effects of increasingly differentiated higher education systems and new kinds of relationship between them and the labor market. The subsequent section considers the division of labor between higher education and employers in the development of employment-related knowledge and skills. The final section considers the effects of globalization, features of the knowledge society, and the need for education and training throughout the life course.
Graduates in Employment Notwithstanding the concerns and scares about graduate unemployment that periodically surface in most countries from time to time, the evidence is pretty clear and consistent that graduates are more likely to be in work than nongraduates and are likely to earn more. Recent data published by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) show, for example, that 89% of male graduates and 79% of female graduates aged between 25 and 64 years participate in the labor force compared with the total participation rates of 82% men and 63% women. Unemployment rates among men are 3.5% for graduates compared with 5.7% overall, and for women 4.3% compared with 6.8%. Graduate earnings compared with people with upper secondary qualifications are typically 50% greater, the highest benefits apparently
Employability of University Graduates and Graduate Outcomes
going to British women (a 98% advantage compared with upper secondary education) and American men (an 88% advantage) (OECD, 2004). A few years ago, the author summarized some of the main features of graduate employment as follows: graduates were unlikely to experience long-term unemployment; were likely to earn substantially more than people with
an upper secondary education; were likely to experience high levels of job satisfaction
and responsibility in the long term; were increasingly likely to experience a transitional
period of several years between leaving higher education and entering ‘‘long-term’’ employment; have different experiences in the labour market according to what and where they studied, as well as according to a wide range of other educational and sociobiographical characteristics. (Brennan, 2001) Further expansion of higher education does not appear to have changed this picture. A recent comparative study of graduates from 13 countries (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006) reported an average unemployment rate among graduates of only 4%, 4 years after graduation. Only Spain (with 13%) and France (with 10%) were significantly higher, although these latter cases do underline the point that graduate employment is not immune to the effects of general economic problems in particular countries and to changes over time. In most countries, graduate unemployment rates – though consistently low – do tend to rise and fall in line with the general economic state of the country. Data on job quality are notoriously difficult to interpret but from the above study, we can note that 78% of employed graduates had permanent contracts of employment (again Spain was the exception with 50% of graduates on temporary contracts), that 6% were self-employed and the average annual gross income was 28.2 thousand euros. Seventy percent were in professional, managerial, and other high-level positions and a further 18% were employed as technicians and associate professional positions. Only 12% considered that they were in jobs which did not require advanced levels of educational attainment (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 136). Job satisfaction seemed quite reasonable with 64% of the sample indicating they were either satisfied or very satisfied with their current jobs. Of course, aggregate figures can hide some important differences between groups of graduates. The subject of study is important in many countries, although sharp differences at the time of graduation tend to lessen with time. In the study mentioned above, the highest level of unemployment by subject was found among natural scientists (at 7%) and humanities graduates (at 6%) (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 82), illustrating the point
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that it tends to be the graduates from nonvocational courses, irrespective of field, who are more likely to encounter difficulties in finding suitable employment. Other factors that can influence the employment prospects of particular groups of graduates include the status of the higher education institution attended, the social background, age, ethnicity and gender of the graduate, and experiences such as work placements and other employment-enhancing activities within higher education, although the effects of the latter tend not to be very great over the long term (Mason et al., 2003). All of this is indication that graduates are successful in getting jobs but not how well they are doing them. This second question – and a crucial one to the human capital argument – is less easy to answer. Some studies have seen graduate employment as largely reflecting processes of elite reproduction (e.g., Brown and Hesketh, 2004) following Bourdieu (1996). Others have indicated considerable skepticism about the claimed relationships between higher education and economic growth (e.g., Dore, 1976; Wolf, 2002). Hard evidence of the ways in which higher education improves worker productivity is hard to come by. For example, we do not really know whether graduates are more productive than other workers, what makes some graduates more productive than other graduates, whether graduates make use of what they have learned in higher education when they enter the workplace, why employers prefer to recruit graduates – or certain types of graduates, and what is it – for example, ability, expertise, and ambition – that appears to give graduates the edge in the labor market. Answers to such questions are, at best, incomplete. They tend to be based on the perceptions of key actors – employers and graduates themselves. One can certainly point to voices of employers (though how representative one can never be sure) pointing to the deficiencies and limitations of the graduates they recruit; and surveys of graduates report a mixed picture: Most graduates appreciated their studies and believed that learning in higher education was useful for coping with their job tasks. Yet, there was widespread critique of many aspects of higher education – certainly to a varying degree across countries and fields of study . . . . . . In sum, many graduates who were surveyed did not see close links between study and employment. Only 38% considered their field of study as the only one possible or the best for their area of work, and only half noted a frequent use of their specific area of knowledge. Rather, they perceived a broad range of job requirements which were to a certain extent served by the study programme and by a broad range of experiences prior to and alongside their studies. (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 139)
In short, most graduates get good jobs but we cannot be sure why.
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Differentiation One of the limitations of much of the research on graduate employment has been that it has dealt with aggregations, that is, it has told us about a mythical average graduate without distinguishing the effects of factors such as field of study, type of institution, age at time of study, gender, social and ethnic background, and, indeed, of many more factors. As higher education expands, it becomes increasingly differentiated, both in terms of its institutional forms and in the kinds of students it recruits. The social and educational factors interact to help determine the employment outcomes for the individual. As far as the graduate labor market itself is concerned, it is possible to distinguish between public and private enterprises, between small, medium and large employers, between different employment sectors and types of work, and to identify regional differences, all of which produce demand-side variations that we need to understand. There have also been attempts to differentiate graduate jobs themselves. Kate Purcell and Peter Elias have elaborated a fivefold categorization of graduate jobs as follows (Purcell and Elias, 2004):
‘‘Traditional’’ graduate occupations ‘‘Modern’’ graduate occupations ‘‘New’’ graduate occupations ‘‘Niche’’ graduate occupations ‘‘Non’’-graduate occupations
Distinctions of this sort are entirely valid but extremely time and context bound. After all, there was a time when graduate jobs were largely restricted to the clergy and running empires. They also tend to reflect different national traditions and labor-market characteristics. Such distinctions also reflect getting-a-job factors rather than doing-a-job factors. Clearly, as graduates have become more plentiful in the labor market, they have come to take a wider range of jobs. The question of the usefulness of their education to the job in question applies to all the categories. Is it helpful? Is it necessary? Is it sufficient? Even in something as self-evidently a graduate job as medicine, there is research to suggest that the most useful knowledge is gained on the job rather than at university (see Becker et al., 1961). So far, we have been skirting around one of the most fundamental why questions of all, that is, why is it that employers prefer to recruit graduates and, on the whole, elect to pay them more? Besides the screening and productivity answers, there is also the answer that employers want to get the best people, if only for reputational reasons, and are prepared to accept higher education’s definition of who are the best. An expanded higher education system of course eventually fails to deliver this – it produces too many people who cannot
all be best – and so it becomes necessary to differentiate the system in status terms, to ensure the identification of an elite within a mass system. It is in connection with the increasing differentiation of higher education, its student population, and the labor market itself that issues of employability begin to confront issues of social equity. This is another major variant of the why question. Is higher education principally about matching skills and talent to economic and employment need in order to generate economic growth (the human capital approach) or is it principally about ensuring that social classes and groups maintain their social positions and status (social reproduction approaches) or have greater and more equitable opportunities to improve their positions and status (social transformation approaches)? It may well of course do all of these things. There are also important international differences to be borne in mind. National higher education systems differ in the extent of their vertical and horizontal differentiation, the former characterized by reputational range and the latter by functional or mission-related differences. There are also international differences in the role played by educational credentials in determining movement through the labor market. The two sorts of differences seem to be linked. Where possession of a specialist credential is a normal pre-entry requirement to a particular job, the educational system is likely to be structured to take account of functionally relevant labor-market differences. Where there is greater formal openness in the labor market – concerning who is theoretically eligible for appointment to a particular job – differentiation is likely to be more reputational and hierarchical. Broadly speaking, Anglo-Saxon-influenced systems tend to accord to the latter characteristics, while continental Europeaninfluenced systems tend toward the former. However, some convergence around the greater flexibilities and skills requirements of modern knowledge economies may also be identified.
Enhancing Employability Higher education institutions in many countries have in recent years been making more explicit the ways in which their academic programs enhance the employability of their students. In many respects, this is in response to pressures from governments and to public expectations that investment in higher education should have real economic pay-off, for both the nation and the individual. Besides making existing activities more explicit, employability has also been the frequent object of new initiatives at both national, institutional, and program levels. The focus on employability tends to shift attention from academic content and skills toward the more generic
Employability of University Graduates and Graduate Outcomes
and transferable things such as teamwork, communication skills, leadership, time management, initiative taking, and setting priorities. However, it can also include enhanced curriculum offerings in subjects such as languages and information technology. Employability-enhancing initiatives vary according to whether they are optional or compulsory, institution-wide or program specific, and whether they are geared to getting a job or to doing one. Where they are optional, questions of take-up become important and the support or otherwise of academic staff can play a decisive role. Where they are compulsory, generally at the program level, whole programs may become vocationalized – geography becomes tourism, sociology becomes criminology, and English becomes creative writing. Particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, provision of career-preparation modules within the curriculum may be designed to equip students for the job search, providing them with presentational skills with which to impress prospective employers. Such assistance is less likely to be provided in countries which have a much closer link between the subjects studied in higher education and future employment. In the latter, it is still subject knowledge and skills which are decisive for employment rather than the more generic skills. These developments have not been without controversy, with some academics seeing them as threatening academic freedom and student choice. Acquiring the skills and dispositions necessary for working life should, from this perspective, be left until after graduation. However, the requirements of modern labor markets may call for a different approach. One American commentator notes that whereas new graduates used to have extended time in their first position to develop interpersonal, applied reasoning, and self-management skills. . . . (but) the complex demands and pace of the new economy require college students to attain a better balance between their academic skills and people-related applied competencies before graduation. (Gardner, 1998: 60)
What may be at issue here is change in the balance of responsibilities between higher education and employers in the preparation of young people for working life.
Division of Labor between Higher Education and Employers All jobs require some knowledge and skills but jobs differ in terms of where these knowledge and skills are acquired. Where graduates lack necessary knowledge and skills on entry to employment, it becomes the employer’s responsibility to equip them. There are considerable differences in national traditions in how this division of
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labor is worked out. For example, the French emphasis on professional education gives its higher education institutions – especially the Grandes Ecoles – a key role in professional formation, whereas this role has tended to be assumed by employers in the UK. In general, the longer first-degree courses in continental European higher education systems allow the inclusion of a greater volume of occupationally relevant preparation. The greater specificity of employment outcomes means that both students and their teachers have a much clearer picture of the kinds of employments they are destined for. Hence, greater preparation for them can be attempted. The Anglo-Saxon tradition has been more about providing an educational base of some breadth as a foundation for subsequent professional education and training often provided by employers. One hears the phrase ‘‘ovenready’’ graduates used as a term of criticism for attempts to load too much of the responsibility for employment preparation onto higher education.
Transition between Higher Education and Employment One of the reasons why there is periodic concern in many countries about graduate employment is that data are often available for only the first few months after graduation. This for many graduates is a period of transition, especially for graduates from the more nonvocational academic disciplines. Decisions about the future have to be made, job applications drafted, and, in many cases, additional qualifications secured. Initial temporary employment might be obtained as a shortterm expedient, while longer-term decisions are thought through. Many graduates appear to start the job-search process rather late, perhaps putting off the evil day of commencing working life or concentrating on the successful completion of their higher education studies. The study by Schomburg and Teichler referred to above notes that on average, graduates spend 6 months on their search for their first job after graduation. Around half had started their job search prior to graduation and, on average, about 25 contacts with employers had to be made before a final choice of job (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 135). The study notes that the timing of initial regular employment after graduation varies significantly among graduates. This reflects different traditions of transition to employment in the countries included, differences in the employability of graduates, different labour traditions according to country, economic sector and field of study and occupational area, as well as different options and strategies of graduates in the transition period. (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 135)
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In this study, 40% were regularly employed in potentially long-term jobs immediately after graduating and a further 25% 6 months after, and a further 10% after 12 months. This left 25% of the graduates still looking for suitable work at the end of the first year after graduation. However, 4 years on, 84% were employed and a further 7% were in full-time graduate education and professional training (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 136). However, the first few years after graduating are a period of transition in another sense. Besides seeking a first suitable job, job changes during the first few years are common as is time spent in further study. A short period of unemployment is not all that uncommon, although this might be largely voluntary, for example, allowing time for the graduate to travel. All of this indicates that it is unwise to view information on the early employment experiences of graduates as an indicator of graduate employment overall. However, various studies have suggested that a late transition into regular employment can be associated with relatively poor career prospects in the long term for particular graduates.
Globalization and the Knowledge Society Much has been written about the new knowledge economies and their needs for greater supplies of well-qualified knowledge-workers. As has already been noted, it is this belief that has justified the rapid expansion of higher education internationally, despite the occasional voices of skeptics (e.g., Wolf, 2002; Brown and Hesketh, 2004). An ongoing international research project (the flexible professional in the knowledge society, a European Union (EU)-funded framework VI project) is addressing questions concerning the requirements made of graduates within knowledge societies and the following paragraphs draw on its conceptualization. The term knowledge society or knowledge economy suggests not only the expansion of higher education and knowledge-intensive or high-technology sectors of the economy but also that the characteristics of the vast majority of work organizations are changing under the influence of the increasing importance of knowledge. This is important to acknowledge as it alters materially our notions of graduate jobs. Moreover, it has implications for the kinds of demands made of higher education graduates. The project distinguishes four such demands: expertise, functional flexibility, knowledge management, and mobilization of human resources. Expertise refers to the possession of specialist knowledge, related to workplace productivity. Functional flexibility is required because of rapid developments in technology, markets, organizations, and relevant knowledge. These make work dynamic and require graduates to be able to respond to diverse challenges and be
willing to rapidly acquire new knowledge. Knowledge management refers to the whole process of developing ideas and implementing them. Mobilization of human resources refers to the capacity to take responsibility for change, of oneself and of others. It is not only partly about leadership but also partly about self-steering and having the flexibility and skills to change the working environment. Of course, not all graduates face all four demands and the reality of employment is of considerable diversity. The project has conceptualized this diversity in the following way, distinguishing between elite and mass and between specialist and generalist positions to give a fourfold classification as follows: 1. Elite specialists – the lawyers, doctors, accountants – need high status based on specialist expertise with recruitment highly regulated and based on possession of educational credentials, generally enjoying a protected position in the labor market. 2. Elite generalists – high-level managers, civil servants, top politicians, and advisors – need some expertise but functional flexibility and knowledge management are more important; recruitment sometimes is based on institutional prestige (Oxbridge, Grandes Ecole, Ivy League) more than credentials. 3. Mass specialists – engineers, nurses, and teachers – need specialist knowledge but do not need to be experts; strict entry requirements are based on credentials but supply much less rationed than elite specialists; therefore, these are more subject to labor-market fluctuations – possibility of status congestion (see Brown and Hesketh, 2004). 4. Mass generalists – marketing, sales, support staff, and administrators – for whom expertise/knowledge is much less important than an optimal mix of knowledge management, ability to mobilize available human resources, and functional flexibility. Recruitment is much less regulated than for the other categories. These are positions in the knowledge society rather than subjects of study, types of higher education, or even types of graduates. Clearly, the expansion of higher education has given rise to a huge growth in the mass categories and most graduates in future are likely to find themselves in these sorts of positions. Another current project suggests that the demand for certain elite specialists will increasingly be met within the global labor market with jobs transferring to low-wage economies possessing high-skills labor – China and India most commonly mentioned (Brown, 2004). However, this seems likely to affect only a limited number of occupations and employment fields. A linked issue concerns the mobility of students and graduates as they use their higher education and its resultant qualifications in order to be geographically mobile. However, while 17.6% of the graduates surveyed in the
Employability of University Graduates and Graduate Outcomes
Schomburg and Teichler study had some international work or study experiences abroad during their higher education, only 2.7% were currently working abroad at the time of the survey (4 years after graduation). A further 5.2% had previously been employed abroad and 10.7% had occasional need to work abroad for short periods (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 127). A further caveat must be made about the nature of the globalized knowledge society by pointing to the considerable national differences that exist in the nature of the relationships between higher education and employment. The Schomburg and Teichler study concludes that: By and large, the . . . . survey demonstrates so striking disparities of graduate employment and work in the 11 European countries and Japan that common elements seem to be at most secondary. (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 139)
Beyond the incontrovertible fact that graduates are more likely to be employed than nongraduates and will probably have better jobs, much else is going to depend on local labor-market conditions and on traditions of higher education’s relationship with it. While there may be some signs of convergence between different national traditions – for example, in the Bologna process in Europe – it seems that multinational employers are also adapting themselves to different local circumstances in different parts of the world. While notions of knowledge economy and society provide useful conceptual tools with which to view graduate employment in different national and local contexts, it also seems likely that it will continue to be unwise to generalize empirically much beyond national (and in some places regional) settings.
Conclusion In a paper based on work done for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) a few years ago, Ulrich Teichler listed what he saw were some important biases in available information on graduate employment. These were: quantitative information is more extensive in the tradi-
tional graduate employment sectors (that are shrinking) and relatively weak in the newly emerging, atypical (and expanding) sectors; an imbalance between quantitative-structural and qualitative data (i.e. plenty of information on the whereabouts of graduates and their income, but much less on types of work tasks, extent to which knowledge acquired in HE is actually utilised);
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employers’ statements are often taken as objective and
factual; researchers assume that practitioners surveyed (employ-
ers, graduates) are ‘experts’ on links between skills and work tasks; research findings in individual countries are often overinterpreted as universal truth (Teichler, 2000). A further bias in the research literature to the ones listed above is the focus on the early years of employment. Even if we are beginning to move beyond the fixation with first destinations, we still rely too heavily on information gained only during the first few years of employment. Evidence on transition is too often interpreted as evidence on employability. Another source of bias is that most research – and contributions to debate – is undertaken by interested parties. There is sometimes a spin put on research findings to draw attention to the positives and the successes. Research that is focused on informing policy or enhancing practice may fail to challenge existing assumptions or raise questions that might produce uncomfortable answers.
Bibliography Becker, H., Geer, B., Hughes, E., and Strauss, A. (1961). Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, P. (1996). The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brennan, J. L. (2001). The Employment of UK Graduates. Bristol: HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England). Brown, P. (2004). The Social Construction of Graduate Employability. Swindon: Economic and Social Research Council. Brown, P. and Hesketh, A. (2004). The Mismanagement of Talent: Employability and Jobs in the Knowledge Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dore, R. P. (1976). The Diploma Disease. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gardner, P. D. (1998). Are college seniors prepared for work? In Gardner, J. N. and van der Veer, G. (eds.) The Senior Year Experience-Facilitating Integration, Reflection, Closure and Transition, pp 60–78. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Mason, G., Williams, G., Cranmer, S., and Guile, D. (2003). How Much Does Higher Education Enhance the Employability of Graduates? Bristol: Higher Education Funding Council for England. OECD (2004). Education at a glance: OECD Indicators 2004. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Purcell, K. and Elias, P. (2004). Seven Years On: Graduate Careers in a Changing Labour Market, p 15. Manchester: HECSU. Schomburg, H. and Teichler, U. (2006). Higher Education and Graduate Employment in Europe. Dordrecht: Springer. Teichler, U. (2000). New perspectives on the relationship between higher education and employment. Tertiary Education and Management 6(2), 79–92. Wolf, A. (2002). Does Education Matter? Myths About Education and Economic Growth. London: Penguin Books.
Introduction Graduate employment is a subject of frequent political and research attention these days. This is because presumed high levels of employability of graduates provides a large part of the justification for the massive expansion of higher education which has occurred in most developed and many developing countries over the last 20 years or so. This justification is twofold. First, the promise of well-paid employment fuels the social demand for higher education. Young people and their parents see higher education as the essential route toward the achievement or the maintenance of a good social position and lifestyle. Second, governments see the expansion of higher education and the consequent increase in the numbers of graduates in the labor market as essential prerequisites for a successful economy. Hence, state investment in higher education becomes a public good with high rates of social return. Claims in recent years about the arrival of the knowledge economy with its highlevel skills requirements have further accentuated the attention given to the second of these justifications and government targets for numbers of graduates in the labor force have been on the rise again. The two justifications rest on somewhat different assumptions about the importance of higher education qualifications in the labor market. The social demand justification requires only that there is a positional advantage gained from possession of a degree. All that is required is evidence that employers prefer – for whatever reasons – to recruit and reward graduates more generously than people with lesser or no qualifications. However, the justification for greater state investment requires the additional assumption that graduates are recruited by employers because they will bring greater productivity to the enterprise and therefore to the economy and hence greater wealth to the nation. The greater productivity may be the result of the knowledge and skills acquired within higher education – the human capital argument; or it may be the result of the selectiveness of higher education institutions in identifying able young people – the screening argument. Or there may be no productivity at all with selection criteria for higher education entrance reflecting personal, social, and educational characteristics of little relevance to the workplace. The latter would still provide positional advantage to the graduates in terms of getting a job, but it would not bring the economic growth associated with greater productivity in doing the job.
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In expanded systems of higher education, with in many cases well over 30% of the age group entering higher education, the selection or screening hypothesis becomes less plausible. Graduates can no longer be considered to constitute an elite. Thus, their greater employability must be seen to rest in the knowledge, skills, and competences they have acquired through higher education rather than through some set of innate qualities. Yet, the elite conceptions of graduates die hard. Much research has been commissioned to determine whether graduates are getting jobs at all and, if so, whether these jobs are of a suitable graduate level. Since expansion of higher education implies that graduates will be entering new areas of the labor market, it becomes difficult to define graduate level and several typologies have been produced to represent different levels of employment, with some clearly regarded as being superior to others. The next section of this article summarizes what we know about the kind of employment obtained by graduates. The following section considers the effects of increasingly differentiated higher education systems and new kinds of relationship between them and the labor market. The subsequent section considers the division of labor between higher education and employers in the development of employment-related knowledge and skills. The final section considers the effects of globalization, features of the knowledge society, and the need for education and training throughout the life course.
Graduates in Employment Notwithstanding the concerns and scares about graduate unemployment that periodically surface in most countries from time to time, the evidence is pretty clear and consistent that graduates are more likely to be in work than nongraduates and are likely to earn more. Recent data published by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) show, for example, that 89% of male graduates and 79% of female graduates aged between 25 and 64 years participate in the labor force compared with the total participation rates of 82% men and 63% women. Unemployment rates among men are 3.5% for graduates compared with 5.7% overall, and for women 4.3% compared with 6.8%. Graduate earnings compared with people with upper secondary qualifications are typically 50% greater, the highest benefits apparently
Employability of University Graduates and Graduate Outcomes
going to British women (a 98% advantage compared with upper secondary education) and American men (an 88% advantage) (OECD, 2004). A few years ago, the author summarized some of the main features of graduate employment as follows: graduates were unlikely to experience long-term unemployment; were likely to earn substantially more than people with
an upper secondary education; were likely to experience high levels of job satisfaction
and responsibility in the long term; were increasingly likely to experience a transitional
period of several years between leaving higher education and entering ‘‘long-term’’ employment; have different experiences in the labour market according to what and where they studied, as well as according to a wide range of other educational and sociobiographical characteristics. (Brennan, 2001) Further expansion of higher education does not appear to have changed this picture. A recent comparative study of graduates from 13 countries (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006) reported an average unemployment rate among graduates of only 4%, 4 years after graduation. Only Spain (with 13%) and France (with 10%) were significantly higher, although these latter cases do underline the point that graduate employment is not immune to the effects of general economic problems in particular countries and to changes over time. In most countries, graduate unemployment rates – though consistently low – do tend to rise and fall in line with the general economic state of the country. Data on job quality are notoriously difficult to interpret but from the above study, we can note that 78% of employed graduates had permanent contracts of employment (again Spain was the exception with 50% of graduates on temporary contracts), that 6% were self-employed and the average annual gross income was 28.2 thousand euros. Seventy percent were in professional, managerial, and other high-level positions and a further 18% were employed as technicians and associate professional positions. Only 12% considered that they were in jobs which did not require advanced levels of educational attainment (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 136). Job satisfaction seemed quite reasonable with 64% of the sample indicating they were either satisfied or very satisfied with their current jobs. Of course, aggregate figures can hide some important differences between groups of graduates. The subject of study is important in many countries, although sharp differences at the time of graduation tend to lessen with time. In the study mentioned above, the highest level of unemployment by subject was found among natural scientists (at 7%) and humanities graduates (at 6%) (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 82), illustrating the point
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that it tends to be the graduates from nonvocational courses, irrespective of field, who are more likely to encounter difficulties in finding suitable employment. Other factors that can influence the employment prospects of particular groups of graduates include the status of the higher education institution attended, the social background, age, ethnicity and gender of the graduate, and experiences such as work placements and other employment-enhancing activities within higher education, although the effects of the latter tend not to be very great over the long term (Mason et al., 2003). All of this is indication that graduates are successful in getting jobs but not how well they are doing them. This second question – and a crucial one to the human capital argument – is less easy to answer. Some studies have seen graduate employment as largely reflecting processes of elite reproduction (e.g., Brown and Hesketh, 2004) following Bourdieu (1996). Others have indicated considerable skepticism about the claimed relationships between higher education and economic growth (e.g., Dore, 1976; Wolf, 2002). Hard evidence of the ways in which higher education improves worker productivity is hard to come by. For example, we do not really know whether graduates are more productive than other workers, what makes some graduates more productive than other graduates, whether graduates make use of what they have learned in higher education when they enter the workplace, why employers prefer to recruit graduates – or certain types of graduates, and what is it – for example, ability, expertise, and ambition – that appears to give graduates the edge in the labor market. Answers to such questions are, at best, incomplete. They tend to be based on the perceptions of key actors – employers and graduates themselves. One can certainly point to voices of employers (though how representative one can never be sure) pointing to the deficiencies and limitations of the graduates they recruit; and surveys of graduates report a mixed picture: Most graduates appreciated their studies and believed that learning in higher education was useful for coping with their job tasks. Yet, there was widespread critique of many aspects of higher education – certainly to a varying degree across countries and fields of study . . . . . . In sum, many graduates who were surveyed did not see close links between study and employment. Only 38% considered their field of study as the only one possible or the best for their area of work, and only half noted a frequent use of their specific area of knowledge. Rather, they perceived a broad range of job requirements which were to a certain extent served by the study programme and by a broad range of experiences prior to and alongside their studies. (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 139)
In short, most graduates get good jobs but we cannot be sure why.
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Differentiation One of the limitations of much of the research on graduate employment has been that it has dealt with aggregations, that is, it has told us about a mythical average graduate without distinguishing the effects of factors such as field of study, type of institution, age at time of study, gender, social and ethnic background, and, indeed, of many more factors. As higher education expands, it becomes increasingly differentiated, both in terms of its institutional forms and in the kinds of students it recruits. The social and educational factors interact to help determine the employment outcomes for the individual. As far as the graduate labor market itself is concerned, it is possible to distinguish between public and private enterprises, between small, medium and large employers, between different employment sectors and types of work, and to identify regional differences, all of which produce demand-side variations that we need to understand. There have also been attempts to differentiate graduate jobs themselves. Kate Purcell and Peter Elias have elaborated a fivefold categorization of graduate jobs as follows (Purcell and Elias, 2004):
‘‘Traditional’’ graduate occupations ‘‘Modern’’ graduate occupations ‘‘New’’ graduate occupations ‘‘Niche’’ graduate occupations ‘‘Non’’-graduate occupations
Distinctions of this sort are entirely valid but extremely time and context bound. After all, there was a time when graduate jobs were largely restricted to the clergy and running empires. They also tend to reflect different national traditions and labor-market characteristics. Such distinctions also reflect getting-a-job factors rather than doing-a-job factors. Clearly, as graduates have become more plentiful in the labor market, they have come to take a wider range of jobs. The question of the usefulness of their education to the job in question applies to all the categories. Is it helpful? Is it necessary? Is it sufficient? Even in something as self-evidently a graduate job as medicine, there is research to suggest that the most useful knowledge is gained on the job rather than at university (see Becker et al., 1961). So far, we have been skirting around one of the most fundamental why questions of all, that is, why is it that employers prefer to recruit graduates and, on the whole, elect to pay them more? Besides the screening and productivity answers, there is also the answer that employers want to get the best people, if only for reputational reasons, and are prepared to accept higher education’s definition of who are the best. An expanded higher education system of course eventually fails to deliver this – it produces too many people who cannot
all be best – and so it becomes necessary to differentiate the system in status terms, to ensure the identification of an elite within a mass system. It is in connection with the increasing differentiation of higher education, its student population, and the labor market itself that issues of employability begin to confront issues of social equity. This is another major variant of the why question. Is higher education principally about matching skills and talent to economic and employment need in order to generate economic growth (the human capital approach) or is it principally about ensuring that social classes and groups maintain their social positions and status (social reproduction approaches) or have greater and more equitable opportunities to improve their positions and status (social transformation approaches)? It may well of course do all of these things. There are also important international differences to be borne in mind. National higher education systems differ in the extent of their vertical and horizontal differentiation, the former characterized by reputational range and the latter by functional or mission-related differences. There are also international differences in the role played by educational credentials in determining movement through the labor market. The two sorts of differences seem to be linked. Where possession of a specialist credential is a normal pre-entry requirement to a particular job, the educational system is likely to be structured to take account of functionally relevant labor-market differences. Where there is greater formal openness in the labor market – concerning who is theoretically eligible for appointment to a particular job – differentiation is likely to be more reputational and hierarchical. Broadly speaking, Anglo-Saxon-influenced systems tend to accord to the latter characteristics, while continental Europeaninfluenced systems tend toward the former. However, some convergence around the greater flexibilities and skills requirements of modern knowledge economies may also be identified.
Enhancing Employability Higher education institutions in many countries have in recent years been making more explicit the ways in which their academic programs enhance the employability of their students. In many respects, this is in response to pressures from governments and to public expectations that investment in higher education should have real economic pay-off, for both the nation and the individual. Besides making existing activities more explicit, employability has also been the frequent object of new initiatives at both national, institutional, and program levels. The focus on employability tends to shift attention from academic content and skills toward the more generic
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and transferable things such as teamwork, communication skills, leadership, time management, initiative taking, and setting priorities. However, it can also include enhanced curriculum offerings in subjects such as languages and information technology. Employability-enhancing initiatives vary according to whether they are optional or compulsory, institution-wide or program specific, and whether they are geared to getting a job or to doing one. Where they are optional, questions of take-up become important and the support or otherwise of academic staff can play a decisive role. Where they are compulsory, generally at the program level, whole programs may become vocationalized – geography becomes tourism, sociology becomes criminology, and English becomes creative writing. Particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, provision of career-preparation modules within the curriculum may be designed to equip students for the job search, providing them with presentational skills with which to impress prospective employers. Such assistance is less likely to be provided in countries which have a much closer link between the subjects studied in higher education and future employment. In the latter, it is still subject knowledge and skills which are decisive for employment rather than the more generic skills. These developments have not been without controversy, with some academics seeing them as threatening academic freedom and student choice. Acquiring the skills and dispositions necessary for working life should, from this perspective, be left until after graduation. However, the requirements of modern labor markets may call for a different approach. One American commentator notes that whereas new graduates used to have extended time in their first position to develop interpersonal, applied reasoning, and self-management skills. . . . (but) the complex demands and pace of the new economy require college students to attain a better balance between their academic skills and people-related applied competencies before graduation. (Gardner, 1998: 60)
What may be at issue here is change in the balance of responsibilities between higher education and employers in the preparation of young people for working life.
Division of Labor between Higher Education and Employers All jobs require some knowledge and skills but jobs differ in terms of where these knowledge and skills are acquired. Where graduates lack necessary knowledge and skills on entry to employment, it becomes the employer’s responsibility to equip them. There are considerable differences in national traditions in how this division of
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labor is worked out. For example, the French emphasis on professional education gives its higher education institutions – especially the Grandes Ecoles – a key role in professional formation, whereas this role has tended to be assumed by employers in the UK. In general, the longer first-degree courses in continental European higher education systems allow the inclusion of a greater volume of occupationally relevant preparation. The greater specificity of employment outcomes means that both students and their teachers have a much clearer picture of the kinds of employments they are destined for. Hence, greater preparation for them can be attempted. The Anglo-Saxon tradition has been more about providing an educational base of some breadth as a foundation for subsequent professional education and training often provided by employers. One hears the phrase ‘‘ovenready’’ graduates used as a term of criticism for attempts to load too much of the responsibility for employment preparation onto higher education.
Transition between Higher Education and Employment One of the reasons why there is periodic concern in many countries about graduate employment is that data are often available for only the first few months after graduation. This for many graduates is a period of transition, especially for graduates from the more nonvocational academic disciplines. Decisions about the future have to be made, job applications drafted, and, in many cases, additional qualifications secured. Initial temporary employment might be obtained as a shortterm expedient, while longer-term decisions are thought through. Many graduates appear to start the job-search process rather late, perhaps putting off the evil day of commencing working life or concentrating on the successful completion of their higher education studies. The study by Schomburg and Teichler referred to above notes that on average, graduates spend 6 months on their search for their first job after graduation. Around half had started their job search prior to graduation and, on average, about 25 contacts with employers had to be made before a final choice of job (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 135). The study notes that the timing of initial regular employment after graduation varies significantly among graduates. This reflects different traditions of transition to employment in the countries included, differences in the employability of graduates, different labour traditions according to country, economic sector and field of study and occupational area, as well as different options and strategies of graduates in the transition period. (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 135)
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In this study, 40% were regularly employed in potentially long-term jobs immediately after graduating and a further 25% 6 months after, and a further 10% after 12 months. This left 25% of the graduates still looking for suitable work at the end of the first year after graduation. However, 4 years on, 84% were employed and a further 7% were in full-time graduate education and professional training (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 136). However, the first few years after graduating are a period of transition in another sense. Besides seeking a first suitable job, job changes during the first few years are common as is time spent in further study. A short period of unemployment is not all that uncommon, although this might be largely voluntary, for example, allowing time for the graduate to travel. All of this indicates that it is unwise to view information on the early employment experiences of graduates as an indicator of graduate employment overall. However, various studies have suggested that a late transition into regular employment can be associated with relatively poor career prospects in the long term for particular graduates.
Globalization and the Knowledge Society Much has been written about the new knowledge economies and their needs for greater supplies of well-qualified knowledge-workers. As has already been noted, it is this belief that has justified the rapid expansion of higher education internationally, despite the occasional voices of skeptics (e.g., Wolf, 2002; Brown and Hesketh, 2004). An ongoing international research project (the flexible professional in the knowledge society, a European Union (EU)-funded framework VI project) is addressing questions concerning the requirements made of graduates within knowledge societies and the following paragraphs draw on its conceptualization. The term knowledge society or knowledge economy suggests not only the expansion of higher education and knowledge-intensive or high-technology sectors of the economy but also that the characteristics of the vast majority of work organizations are changing under the influence of the increasing importance of knowledge. This is important to acknowledge as it alters materially our notions of graduate jobs. Moreover, it has implications for the kinds of demands made of higher education graduates. The project distinguishes four such demands: expertise, functional flexibility, knowledge management, and mobilization of human resources. Expertise refers to the possession of specialist knowledge, related to workplace productivity. Functional flexibility is required because of rapid developments in technology, markets, organizations, and relevant knowledge. These make work dynamic and require graduates to be able to respond to diverse challenges and be
willing to rapidly acquire new knowledge. Knowledge management refers to the whole process of developing ideas and implementing them. Mobilization of human resources refers to the capacity to take responsibility for change, of oneself and of others. It is not only partly about leadership but also partly about self-steering and having the flexibility and skills to change the working environment. Of course, not all graduates face all four demands and the reality of employment is of considerable diversity. The project has conceptualized this diversity in the following way, distinguishing between elite and mass and between specialist and generalist positions to give a fourfold classification as follows: 1. Elite specialists – the lawyers, doctors, accountants – need high status based on specialist expertise with recruitment highly regulated and based on possession of educational credentials, generally enjoying a protected position in the labor market. 2. Elite generalists – high-level managers, civil servants, top politicians, and advisors – need some expertise but functional flexibility and knowledge management are more important; recruitment sometimes is based on institutional prestige (Oxbridge, Grandes Ecole, Ivy League) more than credentials. 3. Mass specialists – engineers, nurses, and teachers – need specialist knowledge but do not need to be experts; strict entry requirements are based on credentials but supply much less rationed than elite specialists; therefore, these are more subject to labor-market fluctuations – possibility of status congestion (see Brown and Hesketh, 2004). 4. Mass generalists – marketing, sales, support staff, and administrators – for whom expertise/knowledge is much less important than an optimal mix of knowledge management, ability to mobilize available human resources, and functional flexibility. Recruitment is much less regulated than for the other categories. These are positions in the knowledge society rather than subjects of study, types of higher education, or even types of graduates. Clearly, the expansion of higher education has given rise to a huge growth in the mass categories and most graduates in future are likely to find themselves in these sorts of positions. Another current project suggests that the demand for certain elite specialists will increasingly be met within the global labor market with jobs transferring to low-wage economies possessing high-skills labor – China and India most commonly mentioned (Brown, 2004). However, this seems likely to affect only a limited number of occupations and employment fields. A linked issue concerns the mobility of students and graduates as they use their higher education and its resultant qualifications in order to be geographically mobile. However, while 17.6% of the graduates surveyed in the
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Schomburg and Teichler study had some international work or study experiences abroad during their higher education, only 2.7% were currently working abroad at the time of the survey (4 years after graduation). A further 5.2% had previously been employed abroad and 10.7% had occasional need to work abroad for short periods (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 127). A further caveat must be made about the nature of the globalized knowledge society by pointing to the considerable national differences that exist in the nature of the relationships between higher education and employment. The Schomburg and Teichler study concludes that: By and large, the . . . . survey demonstrates so striking disparities of graduate employment and work in the 11 European countries and Japan that common elements seem to be at most secondary. (Schomburg and Teichler, 2006: 139)
Beyond the incontrovertible fact that graduates are more likely to be employed than nongraduates and will probably have better jobs, much else is going to depend on local labor-market conditions and on traditions of higher education’s relationship with it. While there may be some signs of convergence between different national traditions – for example, in the Bologna process in Europe – it seems that multinational employers are also adapting themselves to different local circumstances in different parts of the world. While notions of knowledge economy and society provide useful conceptual tools with which to view graduate employment in different national and local contexts, it also seems likely that it will continue to be unwise to generalize empirically much beyond national (and in some places regional) settings.
Conclusion In a paper based on work done for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) a few years ago, Ulrich Teichler listed what he saw were some important biases in available information on graduate employment. These were: quantitative information is more extensive in the tradi-
tional graduate employment sectors (that are shrinking) and relatively weak in the newly emerging, atypical (and expanding) sectors; an imbalance between quantitative-structural and qualitative data (i.e. plenty of information on the whereabouts of graduates and their income, but much less on types of work tasks, extent to which knowledge acquired in HE is actually utilised);
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employers’ statements are often taken as objective and
factual; researchers assume that practitioners surveyed (employ-
ers, graduates) are ‘experts’ on links between skills and work tasks; research findings in individual countries are often overinterpreted as universal truth (Teichler, 2000). A further bias in the research literature to the ones listed above is the focus on the early years of employment. Even if we are beginning to move beyond the fixation with first destinations, we still rely too heavily on information gained only during the first few years of employment. Evidence on transition is too often interpreted as evidence on employability. Another source of bias is that most research – and contributions to debate – is undertaken by interested parties. There is sometimes a spin put on research findings to draw attention to the positives and the successes. Research that is focused on informing policy or enhancing practice may fail to challenge existing assumptions or raise questions that might produce uncomfortable answers.
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