What Do Graduates Do? 2007

What Do Graduates Do?, the annual publication from HECSU and AGCAS, covering the intial career steps of graduates, came out last month.

256,460 UK-domiciled graduates got first degrees from UK universities in 2005, the first time that over a quarter of a million graduates were produced. That's up 1.4% on 2004, which indicates a slower rate of increase than in previous years. 206,965 replied to the destination survey that makes up WDGD, which is a pretty decent response rate of over 80% - this is a good survey (the Higher Education Statistics Agency's Destinations of Leavers of Higher Education survey, to be precise) with good data.

The proportion of women graduates increased again this year. 57.7% of respondent graduates were women.

71.7% of graduates were either working, or combining work and study, six months after graduation.

13.9% of graduates went on to further study or training, with 2.8% going on to teacher training.

6.2% of graduates went on to study another higher degree, another minor fall of 0.1% on last year.

Unemployment was marginally up, 0.1%, on last year, to 6.2%, but still much lower than the figure of 6.9% for 2003 graduates. Graduate unemployment does seem to be a bit lower than usual in the last couple of years.

About 65% of those working six months after graduation were in jobs that required a degree by the standard classifications, which must be an awful blow to the 'degrees are worthless' brigade, but is not too bad a result - of course, the remaining 35% tend to move into better jobs over time.

(About 10% of a given graduate cohort don't get graduate jobs, and under 3% end up long-term unemployed. This seems to have remained about constant since the 80s.)

Starting graduate salaries averaged £17,697. I don't think they'll break 18k this year. There's loads of stuff on individual subjects which I'll get to later. Keep it short and snappy, that's (hopefully) my motto.

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