Graduate Meltdown!

Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? All kinds of doomy predictions about hordes of unemployed graduates (not borne out by stats so far) are being brought out.

But let's take a look at what is actually happening. In 2007, when the economy was still booming, 6% of new graduates from 2005/6 were unemployed six months after graduating, as you can see on the chart to the right. That was actually a pretty reasonable year, so it makes a good guide to how things looked when the economy was going well.

Even at this point, only 8.1% of those graduates who were working were actually in jobs in business and finance, and many of them were not in banks or funding institutions - they were employed as accountants and auditors in companies, or as management consultants.

This is not a great situation for graduate employment, by any stretch. But nor is it meltdown. It isn't fun if you wanted to be a London-based banker. But only a small minority of graduates did in the first place, and it is irresponsible to worry people with a big life change ahead of them by presenting the plight of a small minority of graduates as typical of all of them.

Great HE Myths

Aha, that's what daylight looks like! As I crawl out from under a huge project, I urge any readers to take a look at this great piece by John Sutherland, looking at myths about higher education.

The argument in 'Tryth 3' is slighly facile with a kind of blithe assumption it's easy to earn £100k a year if you feel like it, and I'm not convinced by his apparent equivocation on plagiarism (although I think it's an interesting point).

But overall, the article makes a very good case that much of the things people 'know' about HE are, essentially myths.
Standards have not self-evidently fallen. Some subjects are not self-evidently 'easier'. A degree has value and is not pointless.

More of this kind of article, please, and less deliberately misleading, agenda-driven headlines to articles that don't match the contents.

Unfashionable Opinions Ahoy

Our MPs are great.

It's hard to imagine a more unfashionable opinion, but it becomes much easier to justify when you read today's report from the Innovations, Universities and Skills committee which looks at the work of DIUS and the Research Councils, and concentrates on the debacle of the STFC's science funding.

The report makes some excellent statements, but essentially, it berates the Government for forgetting the Haldane Principle, which is "

named after Richard Burdon Haldane, the 1st Viscount of Haldane, who chaired a committee in 1918 which produced a report (known as the Haldane Report) that recommended that non-departmental-specific research should be managed by scientists through 'Research Councils'"

I will quote the conclusion to the section on the STFC in full

STFC's problems have their roots in the size of the CSR07 settlement and the legacy of bringing CCLRC and PPARC together, but they have been exacerbated by a poorly conceived delivery plan, lamentable communication and poor leadership, as well as major senior management misjudgements. Substantial and urgent changes are now needed in the way in which the Council is run in order to restore confidence and to give it the leadership it desperately needs and has so far failed properly to receive. This raises serious questions about the role and performance of the Chief Executive, especially his ability to retain the confidence of the scientific community as well as to carry through the necessary changes outlined here.

Let's hope that some lessons are learnt from this and UK science suffers no lasting damage. That the IUS Committee have been so forceful gives me hope.

ONS Independence Day (Guaranteed Rickroll Free)

Here at the sober coal face of graduate employment research, we do not do seasonal levity.

Today sees the launch of the UK Statistics Authority, the body charged with the implementation of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (well, someone might want to read it. We're all about sourcing here.)

Or, in other words, the body who now oversee the Office of National Statistics, who are no longer under direct ministerial control. The whole stats function for the UK now reports to Parliament.

Here's the statement.

The ONS website looks much the same, though.

While we're here, let's quickly examine the report from Friday participation rates which has excited a little press comment.

It's the same one that happens every year in which the Government admits they're not going to get 50% of young people into university any time soon, and the Press and Opposition pretend that they're surprised and haven't spent a lot of time and effort trying to make sure that the target isn't met. All good slapstick fun.

Anyway, in 2006/7, we actually sent fewer young people between 18/30 to university as a proportion of the total population - 40% - than in the previous year. That will no doubt please some people, but isn't actually great news for the long-term health of the economy, as the Leitch Report made clear.

This is slightly worrying, and we cannot compete globally with a workforce that is becoming less well educated.

Some nurses might not get jobs straight away, say Lib Dems

A hugely enjoyable story on the BBC today about nursing.

The Lib Dems appear to have discovered HESA's student destination information and have used it to find out that some people who study nursing don't actually become nurses straight away.

In 2005/06, 770 nursing and midwifery graduates did not have a NHS post compared with just over 400 in 2002/03, latest figures show.

As the article points out somewhat further down the page,

The figures were based on more than 11,000 graduates in 2005/06 up from around 9,000 in 2002/03

No, let's be properly accurate about this. In 2005/6, there were 11,225 nursing and midwifery graduates from the UK, of which 8,820 actually replied to the survey.

770 graduates not entering NHS nursing is 8.7% (I'm reporting rounded figures as I am a responsible data user).

In 2002/3, there were 8,640 (not 'around 9,000', as the article claims) nursing graduates from the UK, of whom 6,920 responded to the survey. 440 graduates not entering the NHS is 6.4% - so there's definitely a proportionate increase.

So let's take a look at what the nurses not doing nursing are actually doing.

Well, 1.9% were unemployed. That's not a lot, but it's more than 4 years ago, when 0.7% were unemployed six months after graduating.

Of those who weren't unemployed and were working, what were they doing? Well, actually, the most common job was management, which suggests that these nurses were not settling for second best. Other popular roles included positions in housing and welfare and in drug support. There wasn't a great deal of employment in things like supermarkets and call centres - you can be sure the Lib Dems would have mentioned it if there was.

It is not accurate, as the Lib Dems have done, to imply that all of those nurses who are not working in the NHS six months after graduating have been forced into that position.

There is also a regional pattern to both unemployment and non-NHS employment. Some regions see graduates rather more likely to be unemployed and not employed as NHS nurses. Unemployment rates by domicile range from 0.3% for nurses from Northern Ireland, to 3.7% for those from London. Nurses are more likely than most graduates to be female, to be mature, and to study and work in their home region. There are areas, as in teaching, where there are more positions available than others.

What's interesting about this story is the way the Lib Dems seem to be trying to suggest that they've uncovered some buried scandal. The BBC actually say, "Figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats", as if they had to interrogate a mandarin.
Well, only as much as it would have taken 10 minutes with a publicly available dataset to produce the data, as I just did. Or they could have got most of it from here. This wasn't a hard piece of work to produce.

What does it actually tell us? Well, undeniably, proportionally more nurses than 4 years ago are not in the NHS six months after graduation (although, more actual nurses are). However, we are training a lot more. And should they all being going into the NHS?

Some of these nurses do want to go into the NHS and can't - we know that, it causes them distress and is something that should be tackled.

Some want to go into the NHS, there may be positions available but not where they want to work, or in the kind of nursing job they want to do. That's a murkier issue.

And some train as nurses and don't go into the NHS because they change their minds during their courses, or because they get another offer they prefer. That doesn't mean that they don't ever come back, or that their course was a waste of time.

The Lib Dems have not done anything to distinguish between these three cases and treated them all as equally bad. That's not helpful, and it's not useful. They would have been much better identifying those graduates for whom nursing courses have definitely not brought about the outcome they wanted and working out why. But that would have been hard and taken longer. 10 minutes with a spreadsheet has got them a BBC headline. Well done Norman Lamb.