Graduate job prospects declining, tracking of university students finds

By Peter Walker. Salary premium reducing year-on-year as 40% fail to get graduate-level work two years after gaining degree.
Britain's graduates face an increasingly challenging jobs market, with 40% failing to get graduate-calibre posts more than two years after leaving education, around twice the proportion of their peers a decade earlier, according to a study of recent ex-students' career paths. Overall, the vaunted graduate salary premium, a key argument in persuading would-be students to rack up significant debt to pay for a university education, has declined by as much as 2% a year compared with average national earnings over the past 10 years, the Futuretrack survey found.
The research has worrying implications for social mobility, finding that non-white graduates are significantly more likely to experience unemployment, while the chance of being in a non-graduate job rises for those whose parents do not have degrees. The study by Warwick University's Institute for Employment Research, funded by £1.1m from the Higher Education Careers Services Unit, tracked 17,000 people from the moment they began applying for higher education courses due to start in autumn 2006 into the winter of 2011-12, gathering information on their views and prospects four times in that period. The same institute did a similar if less comprehensive study of graduates in 1999, allowing researchers to make comparisons. More...