The number of people graduating from university now vastly outweighs the number of high-skilled jobs available, claimed a report from a human resources association on Wednesday. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) report said that this “raised questions about the size of the higher education sector in relation to the job market”. But its warning seems extremely shortsighted in its assumptions – if anything, graduate employment opportunities are improving and we’ll need more people with degrees in future.
While the CIPD report threatens to put people off higher education, the CBI has forecast that by 2022, half of all jobs will require workers to have completed some form of higher education at level 4 or above.
If the UK is to build a strong economic future around a hi-tech economy, it will require highly skilled graduates and technicians.
The Perkins Review on engineering which came in November 2013 predicted that, by 2020, the UK economy would require 830,000 professional scientists, engineers and technologists, largely to replace those leaving engineering practice through retirement. This worked out to over 100,000 new professionals each year.
The idea, that some have suggested, of limiting the number of graduates when the rest of the developing world is investing in recruiting more students is completely ridiculous. How far behind does the UK want to be in a global knowledge economy?
Even in the short-term, there are problems with the CIPD survey. It is not truly reflective of the current market because it is based on European Social Survey data from 2010, when the job market was much bleaker for graduates. The Higher Education Statistics Agency actually reported a rise in professional graduate employment in July this year – 69% of university-leavers who had gone straight into work were in professional jobs. .
Clearly universities need to serve young people better by matching their career aspirations to the jobs out there in the marketplace. But we need to recognise that universities have changed, and that increasingly they are delivering more programmes and extracurricular activities that meet the future needs of graduates.
While graduates during challenging economic times may well be in jobs that are classified as “non-graduate”, it is still they who are being employed in preference to non-graduates.
Employers recognise that graduates are more flexible and offer more potential than school-leavers. Youth unemployment at over 14% is still much higher than the 7% unemployment rate among today’s graduates, according to Hesa statistics on what students are doing six months after graduation.
While universities may not suit everyone, we still have vast numbers of young people who have just left school and stand to benefit – educationally, socially and financially – from doing a degree. Let’s not frighten them off with headlines that focus on the narrowest definitions of graduate employment.
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