Longitudinal learning, Marcus Allen

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

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

shows that the top 100 graduate employers recruit mostly from a handful of universities, with the ten most often targeted in 2017- 2018 being Manchester, Birmingham, Warwick, Bristol, University College London, Cambridge, Leeds, Nottingham, Oxford and Durham – all Russell Group members. For subjects including Biological Sciences, Economics, Law and Languages, graduates from Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Bristol, Durham and Warwick are in the top 15 in terms of median earnings five years after graduation. In terms of graduate salaries across subjects, it is no surprise that graduates from Medicine, Dentistry and Economics do much better than those who read Agriculture & Related Subjects, Creative Arts & Design and Historical & Philosophical Studies, irrespective of institution.

Interestingly, there are some stark differences in earnings outcomes for graduates from different universities who read the same subject. As expected, Law graduates from Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, UCL and Warwick are doing very well in terms of salaries, with median earnings between about £28,000 and £62,000 p.a. five years after graduation. However, Law graduates from Bradford, Bedfordshire, Bolton, University of South Wales and Derby have median earnings of between £14,000 and £20,000. To put this into perspective, the general median salary for all 24-29-year-olds in work in 2014-15 was £20,800. According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), 17,805 students graduated with Law degrees in 2017. High Fliers Research has found that the top 100 graduate employers only offered 861 vacancies in the Law sector, enough for fewer than 5% of the Law graduates. Andy Gardner from the Central Careers Hub refers to this as ‘degree farming’, where universities are just culturing graduates in certain disciplines because they can recruit the numbers and teach the courses cheaply with no regard to whether there is an actual need or use for their graduates in the workforce. There is an argument, of course, that it is not necessarily the role of a university to provide society with workers trained with the appropriate required skills based on labour market information. There is a

complex picture in Law, and earnings will reflect the graduates who gained a training contract, most of whom will be former students at Russell Group universities. We should perhaps be careful when advising students who say they wish to study Law ‘because it will help me get a well-paid job’.

Architecture, Building & Planning throws up some interesting surprises. This is topped by Anglia Ruskin with median salaries of £32,000 to £38,000 pa five years after graduation while median salaries from The Bartlett, UCL’s flagship School of Architecture (ranked 15th), are between £23,000 to £31,000 a year. Also in the top ten are the University of Westminster, Nottingham Trent, the University of Central Lancashire and Robert Gordon University, none of which usually make the ‘Mums and Dads’ list of desirable universities! Mass communications & documentation, which includes degrees such as Media Studies, Film Studies, TV and Film Production and Journalism, also shows some interesting results. The university with the highest median salaries five years after graduation is Loughborough, but in positions 2 to 6 are City, Sheffield, Leeds, Oxford Brookes and Bournemouth. Some of these institutions are not necessarily on pupils’ top choices lists, but have often been well known in their various fields. For pupils who want to study in these more specialised areas, we will have to be careful to keep up with which institutions are providing the best appropriate degrees so that we can advise them accordingly.

It looks as if LEO data is here to stay and will, no doubt, start to be included in the metrics used to construct university league tables. For us, as advisers, it is another set of data which we can use to keep ourselves updated on careers outcomes and help us to give our pupils the best possible information and guidance. Marcus Allen is Head of Higher Education, Careers and Professional Guidance at Benenden School