The numbers that prove graduate salaries are falling
Students who left university this summer start on lower salaries in real terms than those who graduated three years ago. Employers get an average of 91 applications for every vacancy
Prices contain information. We don’t have to like the information but we do have to pay attention.
Falling graduate salaries mean we’ve too many graduates. Close the universities therefore. Everything below Russell Group perhaps.
Well, I’ll go to the foot of our stairs!
Who would have thought it: that Blair’s diktat to create a flood of mediocrity going into universities would lead to an oversupply of largely mediocrity coming out, and that that supply/demand/price thingy would rear its ugly head.?
Universities are supposed to be for la crème déclarée crème not the skimmed milk.
Employers get an average of 91 applications for every vacancy
Is that all? We get hundreds of applications, the majority of them from recent arrivals from the Third World (no, they’re absolutely useless).
Only 91? I have to apply for between 200 and 400 jobs to get one job. In the 1990s I had to apply for 30 jobs per actual job obtained.
jgh – Damn.
Probably something like 90% of advertised jobs aren’t really available, the hiring manager already knows who he wants and is just going through the motions to please HR.
In the antediluvian era when I went to university we were about 4% (approx) of our age cohort.
In my final year I applied for twelve jobs. One firm lost my application but another offered me a choice of two. So 12 out of 12. Then two outfits to which I had not applied head-hunted me. 14 out of 12.
Them Wuz The Days.
Close the universities therefore. Everything below Russell Group perhaps.
That might be a reasonable rule of thumb. Some here would suggest starting from the other end of the scale by closing down Oxbridge and others argue for STEM and only STEM courses.
Irrespective of the “Uni”, prospective students should ask the admissions service what the career outcomes have been for students doing that course over the last few years. A vague response means “avoid this course” and a full answer with some numbers would be a useful guide.
Then again, the student body as a whole is so beset with wokeness, intolerance and “issues” that if I were looking for employees I’d be looking at school leavers, ex service personnel or people with five years’ work experience. I’d also probably be biased against females.
TMB – That might be a reasonable rule of thumb. Some here would suggest starting from the other end of the scale by closing down Oxbridge and others argue for STEM and only STEM courses
Our policy should be: defund our enemies, fund our friends.
On that basis, 90% of the HE sector should be closed down and their lecturers redirected to more valuable ways of serving society (at McDonald’s).
Nothing of value would be lost if Oxford and Cambridge were repurposed to soft play areas for children.
“Everything below Russell Group perhaps” … “Some here would suggest starting from the other end of the scale by closing down Oxbridge” … “others argue for STEM and only STEM courses”
That’s all top-down government planning. A market-led solution is better and easier. Just link the universities’ funding to the student loan repayments by their former students, and we’ll soon see decently targeted closures of courses and universities.
RichardT – Yes, I agree. I was responding to Tim’s suggestion but on a previous thread concerning “Uni’s” weeping about the threat of closure for lack of government money I proposed basing funding on the repayment ratio of student loans.
As I’ve said before, close the bottom 25% of unis, and another 25% of departments and courses (esp. any with the word ‘Studies’ in the title). Aim to go back to around 25-30% of school leavers going, then abolish tuition fees but keep maintenance loans (As Richard and TMB say, make the Uni’s fund the loans so they encourage students to pay back)
@RichardT
The problem with that is that Soros, Gates and their like will fund the NGO sector such that all those grievance studies graduates can pay back their student loans. We’ll end up with doctors, economists, engineers, lawyers and 3rd Sector dickheads. No musos or artists.
Mind you we can happily lose the artists, and I speak as someone with a BA in Fine Art.
Norman,
“The problem with that is that Soros, Gates and their like will fund the NGO sector such that all those grievance studies graduates can pay back their student loans. We’ll end up with doctors, economists, engineers, lawyers and 3rd Sector dickheads. No musos or artists.”
I don’t have a problem with that. It’s Soros and Gates money, if they fund the jobs that companies that get the loans repaid with their own money, that’s fine. Same as how Jay-Z is a big fan of Basquiat’s art. As long as Mr Z doesn’t want me to chip in for it, I’m fine.
Also, most musos and artists don’t even come through uni. Rock, opera, ballet are either you learn it as you go or go to conservatoires and ballet schools. We do not need even half of the violinists coming out of the Royal College of Music.
Steve,
“Probably something like 90% of advertised jobs aren’t really available, the hiring manager already knows who he wants and is just going through the motions to please HR.”
Been there, done that. Even put a few skills on that we really didn’t need, just because the bloke we wanted had them.
But it’s why I mostly prefer to work in smaller companies where HR are not an army of graduate powerskirts but a couple of women called Doreen and Sandra who just do the paperwork (and are generally nicer people, too).
@Meissen Bison
In that case I possibly got the idea from you first. Apologies. It’s a good one.
Steve said:
“Probably something like 90% of advertised jobs aren’t really available, the hiring manager already knows who he wants and is just going through the motions to please HR.”
Particularly rife in the public and semi-public sectors. I hadn’t realised the extent to which the private sectors had also been infiltrated.
Norman said:
“The problem with that is we’ll end up with doctors, economists, engineers, lawyers and 3rd Sector dickheads. No musos or artists.”
I’m not convinced that art or music have improved since they became a common university degree subject.
All fair comment about musos and artists. I had a 10 year career as a session musician followed by a 9 year spell in R&D developing musical instruments at a large, well-known manufacturer and I’m a largely self-taught Art School musician. That said, it’s a rare classical concert virtuoso who hasn’t attended a conservatoire of some kind, which is after all mostly a vocational training in technique, not ‘academic study’. Top-level musical performance takes real long-term work.
And I can attest that budding artists learn fuck-all technique at art school, because most of the resident staff are failed artists who have fuck-all technique. The rest is bollocks. I taught myself from books.
My major point is that I doubt shrinking the university sector is going to stem the flow of 3rd Sector dickheads.
Naw, that’s not a good idea to decide who has to close. It is better to make the universities guarantee the loans students have to take, so if the course is rubbish and the student doesn’t get a job that pays x% above minimum wage within (say) 5 years of graduating, the course was free (minus the time the student wasted on it) and the university gets to reconsider it’s curriculum. That way we might keep more universities but the course quality will rise.
RichardT:
That’s very kind of you. I think natural attrition is the best approach for most publicly funded bloat.
And I can attest that budding artists learn fuck-all technique at art school, because most of the resident staff are failed artists who have fuck-all technique.
Years ago I went to an exhibition of jewellery & design by that year’s university students at (I think it was) the ICA. Learning experience that was. Not. Out of hundreds of exhibits, I reckon a couple were worth looking at. And there was an almost total absence of applied technique. Most of it was the sort of thing you see at evening classes. Bits of badly bent wire with stuff hanging from them. Very little of it actually wearable.
What they do on these courses I haven’t the vaguest idea. This is a craft where design is actually driven by technique. It’s what you can do produces what you make. Example: Twist a couple of wires together (I used to use an electric drill), fold it half, then twist them in the other direction. Then pull the result through a square holed, or D- shape holed drawplate. That will produce a length of metal with intricate repeating pattern along it. Cut a length, bend & solder the ends together, you have a patterned ring. The “design” is being generated purely by the technique. You have to know when to anneal the metal to make it soft enough to work. And when not, so it ends up work hardened & rigid & not easily bent out of shape in use. And how to preserve that rigidity during the soldering process.
Real art painting is a great deal technique. Look at old paintings in galleries & you can see the techniques the artist used to get the effects he wanted. Brushwork & spongework, both wet & dry. Knowing how to grind pigments & blend with oils. Which pigments chemically react with others, so can’t be used together. What to put in oil paint to accelerate or retard drying. Or to put in water colour medium to retard drying, for washes. All I seem to see these days is acrylics & a bit of airbrush.
BIS,
“What they do on these courses I haven’t the vaguest idea. ”
Broadly speaking, whatever fashionable thing they feel like doing. Because the education is detached from the market.
What works in education is when the people who want educated people and will pay them based on that education are running it. Like the Wine and Education Spirit Trust is run by wine industry people. So its qualifications are highly respected. I got a great education on my BTEC because the course was designed for industry, and my lecturers were nearly all part-time industry people. They taught us COBOL at the time because that’s what industry wanted. So you’re spade-ready. Degrees were teaching Pascal, which was theoretically better but almost no-one used Pascal.
@ Richard T
My college is largely (and has been for several centuries since it was founded) financed by donations from grateful graduates whose education was largely funded from donations from earlier grateful graduates. That suggests to me – but not to Steve who chooses to be ignorant – that it adds considerable value.
Yes, it does receive *some* money from tuition fees but nothing like enough to cover costs – it gets more from current donations and income from historic endowments (gifts to invest rather than spend all at once than from tuition fees and other charges to undergraduates.
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