Gender and ethnicity graduate gap outlined by new UK data

The gap in the employment prospects for graduates from UK universities depending on gender and ethnicity have been underlined in the first release of a major new survey.

According to Graduate Outcomes, published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) on 18 June, white graduates were several percentage points more likely to be in full-time employment more than a year after leaving university, while male graduates were paid 10 per cent more than female graduates overall.

The results are among those to come from the first “experimental release” of Graduate Outcomes, which looks at people's work status 15 months after leaving university. It replaces the old Destination of Leavers from Higher Education survey, which surveyed people just six months after graduating.

More than 360,000 graduates who left university in 2017-18 gave complete responses to the new survey, although this was less than half the target population of almost 770,000.

Among the headline findings, the data show that black and minority ethnic graduates were more likely to be unemployed than white graduates as well as less likely to be in full-time employment. Some of the figures are most stark for black graduates: just 51 per cent of those who left undergraduate-level courses at universities 15 months earlier were in full-time employment compared with 62 per cent of white graduates.

In terms of gender, the data are potentially most striking for graduate salaries, with a higher proportion of women than men in salary bands under £27,000. The trend is even more apparent for undergraduates: for instance, about three-quarters of female graduates in full-time paid employment after 15 months were earning less than £27,000, a figure that was just 59 per cent for men.

Data from the survey are also likely to fuel the debate about outcomes from different types of courses.

For instance, of leavers from non-science undergraduate courses in the UK who had gone into work, 63 per cent were in high-skilled occupations, a figure that was almost 80 per cent for those who took science subjects.

The data also show that, overall, more than 4,000 leavers from a bachelor’s course were on zero hours contracts, representing about 4 per cent of such graduates.

Rachel Hewitt, director of policy and advocacy at the Higher Education Policy Institute, who previously worked at Hesa and led on the initial work to move towards the Graduate Outcomes survey, said that the statistics showed the “importance of having a rich and contextual picture of the graduate labour market”.

“The data demonstrate clearly the benefits that higher education can bring to individuals’ lives, as well as the wider labour market. However, they also clearly show there are not equal opportunities for all graduates,” she said.

Concerns have been raised about the new data, including around the response rate and potential inaccuracies related to whether graduates were recorded as unemployed despite taking a postgraduate course during the 15 months.

Hesa has tried to mitigate the latter problem by allowing the data to be filtered based on whether graduates went straight into further study after graduating in 2017-18, while Ms Hewitt said although the response rate was lower than hoped, 360,000 responses was a “fairly impressive outcome” and still a firm basis for analysis.

James Robson, associate director of the Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance at the University of Oxford, said that the data were “very useful” in emphasising some equality gaps in graduate outcomes.

However, he warned that the huge labour market upheaval being caused by the Covid-19 pandemic could render some of the data less helpful in the coming years.

“Maybe it will be a good baseline, but what we’re going to see is people from this cohort losing their jobs and people from the next cohort entering a completely different labour market with different skills needs,” he said.

“Another thing that is going to be problematic is if it is used in any kind of [government] regulation” because the data “is going to be so irrelevant” over the coming years because of the current economic crash.

simon.baker@timeshighereducation.com