Call for Papers: CGHE Workshop ‘Unequal Graduate Outcomes: International perspectives over the Long-Term’

Deadline and Schedule

The deadline for submission is 30th of April 2023. We will notify you whether your contribution has been accepted by 21st of May 2023. The workshop will take place on the 11th and 12th of September 2023 in person in central London, UK.

Background

Working age populations have never been better qualified. Worldwide the share of young people in tertiary education more than doubled from 19% to 40% since 2000. Such growth suggests an unabated trend toward ever-better-qualified workforces.

Simultaneously, uncertain trajectories in skill demand due to, for example, the digital transformation of work, low productivity growth, or geopolitical developments raise questions about how well future graduates can use their skills and qualifications in the labour market. Moreover, socio-structural inequalities continue to stratify labour market destinations leading to relevant differences in how well tertiary education meets its promise of better career prospects.

Together these trends challenge the assumption that the large majority of tertiary graduates can continue to secure high-skill careers. However, evidence from predominantly (Western) high-income countries suggests a remarkable stability of typical graduate outcomes so far. These and related themes are the subject of ongoing work at the ESRC-funded Centre for Global Higher Education.

Aims and Topics

Hosted by the Society for Research into Higher Education, this 1 ½ -day in-person workshop in London aims to bring together international experts to examine and compare trends in graduate destinations in the wake of the mass expansion of tertiary education systems.

Of specific interest will be how well the demand for skilled workers has kept up with the supply of graduates, its consequences for inequality and the stratification of opportunities among graduates and beyond. The context of the workshop is the uncertainty in high-skill demand against the backdrop of steadily growing graduate numbers.

Our call for papers and poster contributions invites researchers including doctoral students to reflect on the following themes:

• Trends and inequalities in graduate outcomes including occupational destinations, graduate jobs, and the higher education wage premium.
• Changes in graduate skills mismatch, overeducation, the persistence of mismatch, and the associated pay penalty.
• Social stratification of graduate outcomes and its consequences for intergenerational mobility, origin-education-destination links, and socio-structural outcome gaps.

We warmly invite researchers to send an extended abstract (maximum of 500 words) of their paper for presentation or poster session. Please submit your abstract through this form by 30th April 2023.

We particularly encourage submissions that cover developments in countries of the global South and from early career researchers including doctoral students.

Travel Costs

A limited number of travel grants are available for presenters without access to funding. Please indicate in your submission whether you would like to apply for a travel grant. We will follow up with more information about the process for getting funding upon notifications of acceptance.

Scientific Committee

Dr Golo Henseke (UCL)
Dr Daria Luchinskaya (University of Strathclyde)
Dr James Robson (Oxford University)
Dr Nikki Shure (UCL)
Professor Claire Callender (UCL, Birkbeck)

Contact

If you have further questions about the workshop, you can contact Dr Golo Henseke at g.henseke@ucl.ac.uk