Are the universities doing enough to help students into work?

BY PATRICK CROWDER

If you ask almost any student why they go to university, they’ll tell you: “To get a job after I graduate” or ,“To help my career”. It amounts to a longstanding contract between the university system and its clientele – parents and students. But after the 2007 financial crisis struck, and still more after the advent of the pandemic, there have been doubts as to whether the young are really getting a good deal out of the university system.

Are universities doing enough to help students achieve their goals? Over the summer, Finito World took a special look at university careers services across the UK to see what works, what doesn’t, and what can be done to improve them.

The first issue is the value of a degree as a whole. Given the sheer numbers of people now achieving graduate and postgraduate degrees, employers are looking outside of academic excellence for attributes that make a particular applicant stand out. This can be an internship or work placement, independent work completed outside of university, the imaginative force of a candidate’s application – and any number of other factors depending on an applicant’s chosen field.

Euan Blair, son of the former UK prime minister Tony Blair, is an entrepreneur who runs an education start-up called Multiverse. The company, which made headlines this year on account of its valuation at £147 million, helps young people find apprenticeships as an alternative to university altogether. He believes that the culture of universities must change to focus more on employment after graduation.

“There are a lot of people in the university system who fervently believe that they should not be equipping people for jobs and that it should be learning for learning’s sake and people should do what they enjoy to learn,” Blair tells Finito World. “And that's all well and good – until it isn't. Actually people have to make trade-offs, and that’s the case particularly when universities have allowed there to be this assumption that if you go and get a degree, you'll be able to get a job.”

Not everyone comes to university with a clear idea of their career ahead. It’s certainly true that students will sometimes attend university with a “learning for learning’s sake” mindset, particularly in the arts and humanities. This mindset is noble in many ways, but it has its drawbacks. For instance, students may find that the degree they’ve completed out of a love for the subject matter does not result in any clear path to the world of work.

Antonia Clark is a careers consultant at City University of London with over 25 years of experience. She often sees the struggles students face when trying to figure a way to make a living from their passions.

“Many of them are studying subjects that they’re interested in, but they just can’t relate it to a career,” Clark explains. “Then they get to the point where they postpone [finding a career], because everything they think they see is banking or finance, and they don’t want it.”

In her role, Clark has seen up close the clash between academia and employability described by Blair. “There’s this huge divide between people like me and academics - some of whom say ‘we don’t want to do that stuff, we focus on the research’. If students want careers advice we employ a careers service or a placement team and that’s where they should go,” she continues. “But actually it’s wrong to think young people are that motivated. Many of them feel daunted by the task and an overwhelming sense of competition perpetuated by the media. I think it’s about the guarantee of these skills being built in to the degree.”

One of the ways that university careers services try to help students is to get them thinking about employment early in their university careers – typically during the first year. However, careers services typically have low engagement with the student population. “Only a small proportion of students use the careers service, and that’s pretty much the case nationally. For us (at City) it’s about 11 per cent or 12 per cent of the student body,” Clark concedes.

Even the act of finding people to speak with for this feature proved Antonia’s point – the general attitudes of the students contacted were those of apathy, lack of confidence, and ignorance of their universities’ careers services. To combat this lack of engagement, some universities, including City, are introducing mandatory employmentfocused modules.

“This coming year, all City degrees will have some sort of professional experience built into them. First-year business students all take part in an employability module. Science, maths, and engineering have one in year one as well, which is just a small element of their course, but it’s there,” Clark explains. “We’re piloting a sociology course that will work with a local charity as well. It’s that stuff that really focuses a student in terms of competing at the end and giving them valuable experience.”

If the value of a degree in terms of employability comes from apprenticeships and work experience, students may wonder what the point of the academic side of university is in the first place. Aside from the fact that many jobs require a university qualification, data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that graduates were less likely to be unemployed during the pandemic.

In a study focused on graduate outcomes during the pandemic, the ONS found that graduate unemployment “has been consistently lower than the total” unemployment rate. This doesn’t mean that graduates haven’t been hard hit by the pandemic – in fact, the same study shows that unemployment rates for recent graduates were much higher than usual, reaching a worrying 12 per cent in the third quarter of 2020. Even so, it’s still far better to be a graduate than not. The ONS chalks up graduates’ lower rates of unemployment compared to other groups to their higher level of skills as well as their higher levels of “occupational and geographic mobility”. However, just because a graduate is employed, they are not necessarily in a professional career appropriate to their skill level, and – worryingly again – the skill-towork mismatch turns out to be higher amongst graduates.

The problems with the current system are clear. A greater focus on apprenticeships while attending university is just one of many possible solutions. Robert Halfon MP, who chairs the Education Select Committee, has frequently spoken and written about the ways that universities need to evolve in order to survive as an effective, sensible path to employment.

“If I was in government, I’d be incentivising every company in the country to work with universities and give grants to universities conditional on whether they have a significant number of degree apprenticeships. Every university should do it. It depresses me that Oxford has closed its doors to any kind of apprenticeship at all,” Halfon tells us.

While there is movement towards greater integration between universities and the working world, traditional institutions have often not joined in that shift.

“We look at elite universities the wrong way in our country,” Halfon continues. “An elite university should have a lot of people from disadvantaged backgrounds, brilliant graduate outcomes, embedded work experience and training in the curriculum – and, most of all, significant degree apprenticeships.” of students to produce our exclusive Top Ten of the best careers services in the country. We also factored in a university’s place on the QS Graduate Employability Rankings of 2020, which focused on outcomes for students after leaving university. By examining these factors and assigning ratings for each categories based on our own research, we were able to produce overall scores for each university. and in some cases worryingly so.

Euan Blair adds that he is wary of giving universities advice, but that there are clearly issues with the current system: “I think that there will always be and should always be a place for purely academic learning in a university environment,” he says. “The challenge is, it sort of became this monopoly on early careers in a really negative way.

That’s made universities complacent and it's created this lack of equal access to opportunity – particularly around careers.”

University is an expensive undertaking, both in terms of time and money, yet it is now almost universally expected of Britain’s middle class young people. Attending university for the sake of pure academia is considered acceptable, even honourable, provided the funds are there - but students who attend university with the idea that they will get a job more easily after graduation may be in for a shock.

The great difficulty in writing about the universities is that the stories of apathy in the sector meet the problem that apathy tends not to be particularly responsive. Nevertheless, below we have compiled profiles of the most prominent careers services in the UK, based on extensive research and interviews with members of staff. Insodoing we have come up with our inaugural Finito World rankings of the top universities. In order to do this, we took criteria including technological offering, presence of noteworthy guest speakers, visibility on campus, social media content, size of team, navigability of website, and engagement levels

So what are the findings? Firstly, while we saw much that was promising among universities, the student engagement is almost always too low and the services in question insufficiently hands-on. There remains much to be done to make sure that students get a fair shake in a highly competitive global economy. Some areas for improvement turned up time and again. Extensive early engagement with the careers service did happen at some universities, but it was certainly not the norm. Many of the universities are rightly proud of the one-to-one counselling aspect of their programmes, but unfortunately they are only seeing a small percentage of students on that basis. Lack of engagement with the careers service can also stem from the fact that students may not be thinking about their future careers during their first or second year. It should be a university’s job to ensure that students are aware of the services offered, and to remind them that it is best to begin thinking about careers early in their university lives. Some universities did achieve this through engagement during fresher’s week, careers fairs, and careers-based modules, but by no means all and that approach should be universal. In addition, if engagement among the Russell Group universities isn’t high careers services within UK raises serious questions for other universities, where student employability outcomes are far lower –

Secondly, it is clear that there is a considerable gap in the national fabric where a profound mentoring service ought to be. It is clear that this needs to be enacted by the private sector, as this magazine’s parent company has shown. However, it may be that the private sector needs to partner with our existing university institutions at a far deeper level, and Finito World will be exploring these ideas in subsequent issues. Put simply, many of the universities lacked a personal touch in their careers guidance and would benefit from taking a more one-to-one approach. Careers counselling should take the form of mentorship, not one-off meetings. By keeping the same counsellor/mentor, a student can build a relationship with them, allowing the student to open up about their true dreams and aspirations. We know there is a lot of anxiety around asking for help, so it is much better for a student to speak with someone they already know and trust than to walk into an office for the first time not knowing what to expect.

However, there were many silver linings too, and these were to be found when we were able to conduct in-depth conversations with careers officers.

We have tended to find members of staff at these universities to be both qualified and motivated to help their students. The apathy we have referenced surrounding careers centres has not been displayed by any of the university staff profiled in this feature. In some cases, they have also been disappointed in lack of engagement with their services, especially when the services they offer would be beneficial to students if they took advantage of them.