The employability of graduates: Differences between universities

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Abstract
League tables which show which universities do well and which do badly in getting graduates into jobs have received increasing attention in recent years, especially as a result of the current interest in constructing performance indicators for universities. This paper examines whether a suitable indicator of graduate employability can be constructed from the annual survey of the first destinations of new graduates. Indicators can be constructed based either on the percentage of graduates who proceed to a permanent job or on the percentage of graduates who are still unemployed at the date of the survey. The main finding is that differences between universities in both of these indicators are largely accounted for by corresponding differences in subject mix. The paper also points to several critical weaknesses inherent in the first destinations data. Finally, it is shown that league tables constructed from an indicator based upon the estimated graduate unemployment rate (corrected for subject mix differences between universities) are very unstable over time.

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