The IPOD Generation

I am an idle researcher. Apologies to my reader for not getting around to the Sainsbury Review analysis promised earlier (yet). Blimey, it's a bit of a monster job, but I will limp through it, eventually.

Let's, instead, have a small roundup.

First, Reform's exciting report on the "IPOD generation" - 18-34 year olds who are Insecure, Pressurised, Overtaxed and Debt-Ridden, and how convenient that these characteristics form an easily recognised acronym! Now, having spent most of my life in that age group and only (relatively) recently left it, I don't necessarily disagree with many of the findings of the report. But as far as graduates go, the authors have used incorrect figures for graduate earnings (using the annual NatWest survey which takes a biased sample, and has methodological flaws) to pretend that graduate salaries fell between 2005 and 2006. They did not, and the only way that they could make this statement was to choose the only survey out of several that showed it.

They also play a slightly dicey rhetorical trick by placing rising student numbers next to figures for rising youth unemployment - leading readers to obvious conclusions - without admitting that in the time period they are covering, early graduate unemployment (ie six months after graduation) has fallen - from 7.6% in 1997 to 6.0% in 2006.

In short, this report and the news coverage around it needs to be read very carefully because it could mislead people.

Also in the news is this piece from Stephen Machin and Sandra McNally of the LSE. It is really a digest from this piece (warning, pdf) they wrote earlier in the year for the OECD, and it is a review of the evidence of the effects of tertiary education on economic and social objectives. Machin and McNally show that the evidence available points to the need to increase higher education participation in the UK, that we are not over-supplied with graduates as a whole and that returns to study to higher education are real, significant and not being eroded to any great extent.

It hasn't had a lot of coverage. Shame.

Technorati tags: higher education, universities, graduate employment