Cold home comfort in job hunt

Students who stay in their "home" region to attend university are more likely to be unemployed after graduating, according to statistics released today.

The unemployment rate for first-degree graduates who came from and studied in Greater London was highest at 12.9 per cent, 3.7 per cent above the United Kingdom average for first-degree graduates. The unemployment rate for Southwest students who remained in the region to study was 11.6 per cent, followed by the North and West Midlands, both on 11.2 per cent.

The figures were contained in the Higher Education Statistics Agency report, First Destinations of Students Leaving Higher Education Institutions 1994/95. The survey also revealed much higher levels of unemployment for non-white first-degree students.

Of the 65 per cent of the 162,000 students whose ethnicity was known, 9.7 per cent of white students were unemployed. However, the rate was 17 per cent for blacks.

For all higher education students, the assumed unemployment rate was 7.7 per cent. For first degrees, the rate was 8.6 per cent, but at 7.1 per cent, women recorded significantly less unemployment than their male counterparts (10.1 per cent).

The result was reversed in unemployment rates for postgraduate students, with females on 4.7 per cent, slightly higher than the average of 4.6 per cent and the figure of 4.5 per cent for males.