These pieces in the Guardian were inevitable at some point.
The articles produce a mix of emotions. There's little in there that's not true. But it takes many of the classic features of a scare story; the handful of case studies meant to represent the whole (note: not a one has a science, maths or technology-related degree); the stats used in their simplest sense without qualifiers; the quotes from experts which amount to opinion and might not chime with reality. And the whole thing put together will do little to help students looking for work this year. It will frighten them.
There is no doubt that this year will be grim for new graduates - nobody is saying anything differently. But will it actually be worse than 2002/3, when recruitment of IT graduates fell sharply and suddenly one of the most popular degrees in the country had unemployment rates over 10% - at the same time that Enron went under and took the huge graduate recruiter Arthur Andersen with it? It could - and actually, it probably will - but we are not sure because things do have to be a lot worse than last year and as yet they do not appear to be. That's all we can say on the issue. We have to deal with what we actually know as - especially in this climate - conjecture can be proven wrong almost immediately.
Let's tackle some of the points raised in the article.
The internship scheme is an admission by the Government that there is an issue. An actual official scheme to help graduates in recession is something new. It may not work if, after the internship has finished, we're still in downturn. But it does show that people are not sitting idly by and letting this year's cohort (not 'a generation', by the way) rot. I have reservations that I'll come to in another post, because this one is going to be mammoth.
David Blanchflower talks about the unemployment figures for young people. They are definitely scary. What he does not mention at any point is what proportion of those unemployed were graduates. Nor does the article. We cannot infer anything from those figures other than the fact that a lot of young people have lost their jobs.
We do know that we want to keep bouts of unemployment for graduates short (6 months maximum), because long-term unemployment has serious effects on careers. Blanchflower is correct there as well, and we have to give serious thought to helping graduates who are out of work for a while and how we do that.
Now, the good bit:
Evidence of the extent of the downturn in graduate recruitment uncovered by the Guardian includes:
• Major companies have narrowed their search for graduates to five elite universities as they cut recruitment numbers.
Who, and how many? We know that some finance companies are doing this - but the lack of figures given here is a worry. Is it 5? Is it 500?
• The organisers of the annual graduate recruitment "milk round" say jobs in finance and retail are drying up. Even where companies are recruiting, vacancies will not necessarily last until summer as the economic slump worsens.
Nothing controversial here. We've been telling people this for months.
• The management consultancy KPMG, seen as a recruitment barometer, says its 600 graduate entry jobs are nearly all taken months ahead of schedule as students scramble for the top jobs.
Graduates are planning ahead. That's good - although not good if you're not one of them. To be honest, I'd hope that most savvy graduates would have made some plans by now. 600 jobs is quite a lot, by the way.
• Manchester University careers service, the largest outside London, has seen the number of recruitment adverts taken out with its careers service tail off drastically.
Elizabeth's comment on the previous article tells you all you need to know about how happy she is that a key fact - that they still have more ads than they did in 2002/3 - has been omitted.
• Careers service managers have been inundated with desperate students who don't know what to do when they graduate because their plans are in tatters.
I would like to see footfall figures for careers services over the last 3 months - they'll make very interesting reading. Imperial College have had a lot of enquiries from graduates who wanted to go into finance industry jobs and now think that they can't. That's a worry as many of those jobs are likely to still exist and an Imperial College degree will be a pretty good passport to many of them.
• The slump in graduate jobs threatens unemployment for people with lower or no qualifications as graduates turn their sights on non-graduate vacancies.
This is very true, and actually contradicts one of the key messages from the Guardian piece. Because they're implying that it wasn't worth it for a lot of these students to go to university because they won't get jobs. Except now it seems (as will be the case), that they're still better off than people who didn't go to university because they'll be getting their jobs instead.
(Continued in part 2. Good grief, two parts)
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