Developing schools
Longitudinal learning
Marcus Allen sifts the graduate earnings data
When choosing universities, pupils at many schools have always considered brand value as part of their criteria, if only subconsciously. So, for example, they may be more likely to think about a course at Bristol, Edinburgh, or Durham than the same course at Bradford, Southampton Solent or Liverpool Hope. There are many reasons for this (not to be discussed here) and, as Careers Advisers, we often battle to get pupils to think beyond ‘the usual suspects’. This is compounded by the fact that tuition fees are most likely to be the full £9,250 whichever institution is studied at, so this brand value is also now equated with value for money. The Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) published last Spring provided information collected from the DofE, the DWP and HMRC. LEO data allows the employment earnings of graduates to be looked at, with reference to students who graduated from named courses at named universities a set number of years after graduation. This data is now part of the UNISTATS dataset where all official data from universities and colleges can be compared. The interesting LEO data are the
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2014-15 earnings of those who graduated from university in 2009. The Central Careers Hub (CCH) have nicely organised the data into readable graphs that can be viewed on their website (www.centralcareershub.co.uk/longitudinal-educationoutcomes-data). There are, of course, caveats, summarised on the Wonkhe website, mainly because the data is ‘raw’ and takes no account of the characteristics of the student intake (e.g. A Level grades), or what the students are likely to have done after graduating, e.g. moved abroad or became self-employed (more prevalent amongst graduates from creative degree courses). However, given such caveats, the dataset does give us an opportunity to scrutinise employment and earnings outcomes of graduates from individual subjects from different universities. So, does that teach us anything that may change the advice that we give to pupils when deciding on universities and courses? In general, the data is as expected: our pupils are correct in their view that going to a well-known, usually Russell Group, university will increase their chances of getting a well-paid job. This matches with the findings of High Fliers Research that
