How To Get Your Graduate Survey Covered In The Press

Blimey, has it really been that long since I last posted? I am a very bad and lazy blogger (who has been flat out on assessing the postgraduate labour market and having comedy run-ins with a national newspaper, thanks for asking.)

This week has seen a kind of distillation of how the media reports stories on graduate employment, graduate salaries and graduates in general.

Two major surveys came out - the Association of Graduate Recruiters Survey, and the Higher Education Statistics Agency Destinations Of Leavers of Higher Education Survey.

These are all hideously long names, so like everyone else in the field, I'm going to refer to them as the AGR survey and the DHLE survey.

I've covered the AGR survey at length before, so suffice to say, it's not a bad survey as such, it's just not representative of the graduate labour market - just that bit of it that pertains to big, private sector employers, mainly in London and largely associated with the finance industry. It mainly asks what employers aim to pay new graduate recruits this year. It found that the number of vacancies were up, but that the average starting salaries that their employers expected to pay in London might be down this year. It usually covers in the region of 20,000 graduates.

The DHLE meanwhile, is a census survey of everyone who graduated from university in 2006. It asks graduates what they were doing six months after they get their degree. It's a hugely important survey which is the basis of a lot of performance indicators for universities, and a great deal of careers information and so we get a response rate of around 80%. More than 200,000 first degree graduates (it also covers graduates at other levels, but let's set those aside for a moment) replied to the survey.
It found that everything was pretty much as normal. Graduate unemployment levels remain around 6% (it was 6.2% last year - it may have budged by 0.1%, but I don't have the detailed figures yet). Graduate salaries haven't fallen. Graduate underemployment seems, if anything, to have gone down - although, again, I'd prefer to do the calculations myself before I'm sure. As an aside - it's not collected by Government - HESA are an independent charity - and gets played with by all kinds of awkward independent researchers keen to find where things are going wrong. So it's not a cover-up exercise.

So, two surveys, one non-representative, but with a slightly alarmist (although not terribly significant) message, and one which is representative and tells students and graduates that actually, graduate jobs are in reasonable supply and graduate salaries aren't actually falling really.

Guess which one gets all the press coverage, and which one gets largely ignored?

Technorati tags: universities,higher education,graduates,graduate jobs,graduate salaries,graduate employment