The relationship between higher education, economic development and social change:

1
ICSSR-ESRC Joint Workshop Economic Restructuring,
Higher Education and the Labour Market, and
Social Inequalities 4-5 December 2008, NASSDOC
Conference Hall, Delhi
The relationship between higher education,
economic development and social change
graduates for 'the knowledge economy
Kate Purcell
2
The big questions

• Are we producing too many graduates?
• Are we producing the right kinds of graduates?
• Is there a gap between what higher education
  produces and what employers need?
• Does Higher Education increase social and
  economic equality of opportunity?
• What impact will changes in tuition fees have on
  participation in HE?
• Is it still worth doing a degree in the UK?

Slide 2
3
Structure of the presentation

• How have the UK graduate labour market and its
  context changed ?
• Innovative ways of investigating occupational
  change in the knowledge economy
• Evidence from longitudinal cohort studies
• Reflect upon findings what have we learnt and
  what are the implications for the Indian research
  agenda?

4
Entry to Higher Education, Age Participation
Index (API) 1961 to 2005
5
Why?

• Human capital in particular,
  university-educated labour is increasingly
  regarded as crucial to economic development and
  competitiveness
• successive UK governments have invested in
  increasingly high levels of education on
  assumption that knowledge-based skills and
  innovation are increasingly crucial for
  competitiveness
• evidence that educated labour is more innovative
  and adaptable
• development of social and material educational
  infrastructure.
• Economic restructuring global, sectoral,
  organisational
• Changing demand for skills and knowledge due to
• transformation of UK manufacturing from
  labour-based to knowledge-based (e.g. growth of
  science-based industries chemicals,
  biotechnology, ICT depends on highly skilled
  and educated labour)
• growth and globalisation of market services.
• Impact of technology on information management
  and communication.
• Change in sexual division of labour and global
  concern with the eradication inequalities.

6
Defining graduate occupations - sources of
information

• Databases from development work underlying
  national occupational classifications (SOC90 and
  SOC2000)
• LFS text descriptions of qualification
  requirements for 65,000 jobs (1996/97)
• Labour Force Survey (1.0 million graduates,
  1991-2001 on SOC90, 2002-2006 on SOC2000)

7
SOC(HE) a new typology of occupations

• Traditional graduate occupations
• Modern graduate occupations
• New graduate occupations
• Niche graduate occupations
• Non-graduate occupations

( Elias and Purcell 2005For more details, see
www.warwick.ac.uk/go/glmf )
8
The changing structure of graduate occupations in
the UK, 1980 - 2000
Source New Earnings Survey Panel Dataset
1975-2000
9
Changing structure of occupations UK 1984-2014
Source Unpublished estimates and
projections of employment Warwick Institute for
Employment Research / Cambridge Econometrics,
2005
10
The data we draw on

• Longitudinal survey of 50 of 1995 cohort
  surveyed 3½ and 7 years after graduation, in
  1998/9 and 2002/3, including full work histories,
  and data from a similar cohort of 1999 graduates
  4 years on.
• Follow-up programme of telephone and face to face
  interviews with 200 of the 1995 respondents 7
  years, and 100 10 years on, and 120 with 1999
  respondents 4 years on.
• The first sweep of a census survey of 2006 HE
  applicants before they embarked on their courses.
• Investigation of other longitudinal data sources
  (e.g. Linked Census data, 1981-2001).

11
Occupational mobility of 1995 graduates
Source Graduate Careers 7 Years On Survey
12
Movement of 1999 graduates out of non-graduate
occupations, by subject of degree
Source Class of 99 survey (Purcell et al. 2006)
13
Demographic characteristics of students in
selected subjects
Source Futuretrack Sweep 1
14
Mode of access selected subjects
2 UCAS Tariff score of 360 3 Applying from
secondary school or sixth form college.
Source Futuretrack Sweep 1
15
What sectors did they work in?
Source Graduate Careers 7 Years On Survey
16
Average annual gross earnings of 1995 graduates
by gender
Source Graduate Careers 7 Years On Survey
17
The impact of sector and occupation three
examples
Source Seven Years On a survey of the career
paths of 1995 graduates (Purcell and Elias 2005)
18
Occupational workplace context by gender
Source Graduate Careers 7 Years On Survey
19
The combined effects of various factors on the
gender difference in annual earnings of 1995
graduates seven years after graduation
Source Elias and Purcell (2005)
20
What about more qualitative measures of career
paths? - job quality and career satisfaction

• No evidence of decline in self perceptions of
  job quality between 1995 and 1999 cohorts.
• Majority of graduates (80) are very or
  reasonably satisfied with their careers.
• Majority (80) say that they were using their
  degree skills in their jobs four years after
  graduating

Slide 17
21
Appropriateness of current job for someone with
your qualifications
Source Graduate Careers 7 Years On Survey
22
We identified three clusters of skills in
graduate occupations
Expertise
Strategic skills
Interactive skills
23
Expertise

• Specific, specialist technical knowledge and
  skills that are central to the performance of a
  job
• this expertise is most often acquired on
  vocational degree courses, sometimes followed by
  postgraduate study or professional training and
  accreditation.
• high level of emphasis on technical analysis,
  problem diagnosis and solution.

24
Strategic skills

• The skills required to plan, co-ordinate and
  administer processes and (usually) people
• most senior management jobs require vision,
  capacity to evaluate risks and opportunities and
  take effective strategic decisions.

25
Interactive skills

• The ability to manage one's own or other
  people's emotions for effective performance of a
  job
• examples of jobs that require hard interactive
  skills include negotiation, selling and
  persuasion
• soft interactive skills are associated with
  caring, counselling and welfare provision
• liaison skills require both elements.

26
Use of skill clusters in current jobs by SOC(HE)
Source Graduate Careers 7 Years On Survey
27
Market Research Manager, Female, Pharmaceuticals
manufacturing, earning 40 49,999, natural
sciences degree

• What kind of work does she do?
• feeding back from results on a market research
  study that I commissioned
• an internal meeting with a couple of people from
  my team looking at my ideas for a new way of
  reporting and presenting data
• This afternoon I actually had a couple of hours
  to do a bit of work, putting together some
  information that Id promised for one of our
  sales force teams
• got called into an unplanned meeting to discuss
  the plans for one of our products that Im
  working on
• review of markets in this case, drugs that we
  are looking at, what types of doctors, or what
  types of patients that we want to focus our
  marketing efforts on

28
Events Officer, Public Relations company, female
History graduate, earning 24-27K.

• We spent about an hour watching the budget today
  I have been writing letters to invite speakers,
  Ive got a proposal for a political party
  conference I need to do to ministers, inviting
  them to speak
• Ive got a transport conference in a couple of
  weeks time and Im writing final letters to all
  the speakers to tell them their timeslots, topics
  that I want them to talk on, giving them details
  for the day
• Ive got two proposals to write for party
  conferences, talking the potential sponsors
  through the various options of what we can do,
  giving them the policy context to a particular
  debate, then giving them the questions that Id
  want to cover in that debate, giving them the
  logistics of staging that event, and obviously
  persuading them to pay me vast amounts for that!

29
Lead Project Engineer, Manufacturing, male,
Mechanical Engineering graduate, earning 36-40K.

• Ive got hardware engineers who are designing
  electronics, software engineers who are writing
  software
• Ive got interfacing with purchase who deal with
  our suppliers, interfacing with a customer, so
  Ill be talking to them once a day on the phone
  about engineering issues on the project,
• I might be talking to the finance community
  within our company because they look after the
  whole kind of business model about the project
  that were doing and if theres an engineering
  change or something I have to let them know,
  theres been a cost increase or something and
  then they re-run the model to make sure were
  still making money
• I still do some of the engineering myself, so I
  could be designing wiring harnesses
• Who else do I interface with? Logistics people,
  packaging people, anything to do with the whole
  engineering project, so a complete mix really of
  engineering liaison, finance, and talking to the
  customer

30
Key constructs of new graduate jobs

• Increasing specialisation within service
  industries and emergence of new occupations
• Lean organisations and the impact of ICT hybrid
  jobs
• Impact of increasing supply of graduates and
  availability of a more highly qualified pool of
  potential recruits

31
How our understanding of the changing nature of
the labour market is improving

• Analysed UK Labour Force Survey 2001-2006 (up to
  July)
• Increasing evidence of growth of graduates in
  non-graduate jobs
• The proportion of graduates in new graduate
  occupations remains fairly steady at about on
  fifth of all full-time jobs held by young
  graduates
• Growth of graduate occupations has slowed or
  stopped
• Analysed linked census records over 20 year
  period - shows continuing importance of social
  background as factor influencing access to
  graduate jobs

32
Accessing jobs..

• Increasing importance of unpaid and low-paid
  internships
• Increasing importance of higher degrees and
  professional training
• Employment outcomes vary by type of institution
  attended, region, age and other important
  variables
• ..most significantly, gender.

Slide 28
33
Where is all this research leading?

• Our understanding of the changing nature of the
  labour market is improving...
• and it situates gender at the core of change in
  the graduate labour market and the evolution of
  the knowledge economy

34
The completion of motherhood 22-26 year old
women in 1981 by whether or not have had own
children by 2001, by degree and occupation
Source Census Longitudinal Study
35
Key findings emerging from the UK graduate labour
market studies and their implications

• As graduate labour supply increases, new
  tools/methods facilitate better understanding of
  the relationship between the organisation of
  work, skills, knowledge and higher education.
• Comparative research agenda needs to be broadened
  and strengthened.
• Need to rethink responsibility for skills
  development.
• Women are becoming more highly educated than men,
  but labour market opportunities are profoundly
  gendered work/life balance is a primary
  concern.

36
Higher education in India developing research
resources to inform policy
India facing, to a more dramatic extent than the
UK, issues relating to human and economic
development (economic restructuring, rapid
growth, globalisation, technological change and
recognition of requirement for expansion of
HE) Need to understand better the implications
of HE expansion and to provide suitable policy
parameters Preconditions for researching HE and
career outcomes in India are
-- the need for new and comprehensive
longitudinal survey data resources -- reanalysis
of existing occupational data sources -- better
access to and use of administrative data
resources -- a programme to follow-up of cohorts
of graduates from different types of
institutions, social and cultural backgrounds
37
For further information and links relating to
this project and related research see http//www2
.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ier/research/glmf KATE
PURCELL Kate.Purcell_at_warwick.ac.uk