What does ‘employability’ mean amid global pandemic and recession? Covid-19, higher education and the graduate labour market
Graduate employability dominated the international higher education policy landscape over the last two decades. Governments see higher education as a means of ensuring a skilled, work ready labour force; students increasingly demand job-related financial returns from their ‘investments’ in higher education; and graduate labour market outcomes are now a key metric for regulation and ranking in many countries. However, COVID-19 has a major impact on the graduate labour market. A global recession is predicted, countries’ GDPs are plunging, unemployment levels are rising. In the UK alone, the number of vacancies dropped by nearly 50 per cent in the first quarter of the year, and plans from major graduate recruiters and particularly small and medium sized enterprises are in turmoil. The reality is that many graduates leaving higher education in 2020 and 2021 will struggle to find graduate level employment, or any job at all. History shows that graduates who attempt to enter the labour market at times like this not only face significant early challenges, there can be a significant scarring of long-term career trajectories and life-time earnings. Such impacts are rarely evenly distributed and can deepen existing social and regional inequalities.
Recessions and mass youth unemployment often lead to increased student numbers as individuals shelter from the labour market storm while advancing their position. However, with question marks over teaching delivery during the pandemic and potential difficulties in paying fees in those countries where students finance tuition, student numbers may drop sharply and survey evidence implies this will happen. This may deepen inequalities further with those who can afford it staying on in higher education and those who can’t struggling in the increasingly congested labour market. At the same time work is changing quickly, with automation, digitisation and gigification, processes likely to be accelerated as companies move during the pandemic to maintain production while reducing labour costs. Inexorably these changes mean that the mix of skills required by graduate employers are changing also.
What can individual students and graduates do and how should higher education institutions and systems respond? And in the middle of this crisis of employability how can higher education broaden expectations about its contribution to individual graduate agency and the broader public good? This webinar brings together a panel of three leading experts to discuss these questions, and invites our participation.
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Golo Henseke joined the UCL Institute of Education as Senior Research Associate (Applied Economist) in February 2014. He contributes to the ESRC Centre on Learning and Life Chances, the Centre for Global Higher Education, and a list of further projects. In his research, he focuses on job quality, graduate labour markets, skills, and job transitions. His work is published in high-quality academic journals and referenced in a recent review of the English higher education system, consultations for the Teaching Excellence Framework, and the upcoming revision of the UK-Standard Occupational Classification.
James Robson is Departmental Lecturer in Higher Education at the University of Oxford and Associate Director of SKOPE. He is course leader for the MSc in Higher Education and co-impact lead for the department. James has spent more than a decade working in educational policy and research funding. His current research focuses on the intersection between higher education, professional learning and training systems; skills supply and demand, employability, and graduate labour markets; digitalization; and social mobility.
Anna Vignoles is a Professor of Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a trustee of the Nuffield Foundation. Anna undertakes research into how we can improve students’ academic achievement and help them develop the skills they need in the labour market. She has a particular interest in researching the inequalities we see in access to education (globally) and, in the UK content, the lower levels of educational success of children from poorer families. She also studies the economic and social outcomes from education. Anna has been advisor to Dame Shirley Pearce’s Teaching Excellence Framework review, is on The Sutton Trust Advisory Board and has advised numerous government departments, including the Department for Education, the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills and HM Treasury.
Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, Director of the ESRC/OFSRE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), Joint Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education, and Lead Researcher with Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Simon’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, the contributions of higher education and higher education as a public and common good, and higher education and social inequality. At Oxford he leads the MSc (Education) subject on ‘Global higher education’. His recent books include Higher Education in Federal Countries, edited with Martin Carnoy, Isak Froumin and Oleg Leshukov (Sage, 2018) and High Participation Systems of Higher Education, edited with Brendan Cantwell and Anna Smolentseva (Oxford University Press, 2018).
