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Those of you looking for graduate jobs generally or more specifically graduate jobs in London will probably have been following the news about the recent findings of the 1994 Group (see our previous article for details of the report). If so, you might be interested in the defence that Deian Hopkin, the Vice-Chancellor of London South Bank University, has launched over comments he made following the release of the research.
Writing in the Times Higher Education, he says that he now knows how politicians feel when they claim to have been misrepresented in the press. Hopkins said, “I woke up one morning last week to find a flurry of publicity in which I was reported to have warned students that a “university degree won’t get you a good job.”
He admitted that some of the coverage was fair and accurate but thought that the Evening Standard’s report was, “particularly tendentious and inaccurate. A poisonous cacophony of prejudice about universities and students in general.”
Hopkin said that his main concern had been to emphasise the difficulties involved in attempting to forecast the overall lifetime financial rewards of graduate jobs, “on the basis of slim and generalised data.” He used as an example the £400,000 Government estimate of the extra amount which graduates could expect to achieve due to having a degree (forecast during the tuition fee debate in 2004-05). The University of Warwick later suggested a figure of £180,000 and recently the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills has put the figure nearer to £100,000.
His argument was mainly that students should not be encouraged to make their choice of university and subject based primarily on the promise of high future earnings in graduate jobs. In conclusion he said that he had, “long argued that we should not be persuading students to come to higher education merely on the promise of better earnings. Rather we should stress the wider benefits: personal satisfaction, the greater ability to make life-choices, the quality of life it may provide, even better health and greater happiness. This can be gained from any degree and from any institution; personal development is no one’s monopoly.”
It also worth remembering that location also plays a part in salary as well as university and degree course e.g. graduate jobs in London generally pay more than jobs in less expensive parts of the country. So whilst graduate jobs can definitely lead to higher earnings for graduates, degree course and university may well play a part in the level of those additional earnings. Graduates will also however benefit from personal development and life skills regardless of where and what they choose to study.
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