The Nuffield Foundation has awarded funding to the University of Warwick for an 18-month project to extend its research into the experiences of graduates in the UK labour market.
With funding from the Nuffield Foundation, Warwick’s Institute of Employment Research (IER) will revisit its unique Futuretrack study with a fifth survey wave, investigating the employment situations of students almost ten years after their graduation.
The IER’s Futuretrack study followed a large sample of students who applied to university in 2005/2006. Many of them graduated in 2009/10 into a difficult labour market after the 2008/09 financial crash. They were also the first cohort of students to pay £3,000 a year towards their tuition.
Four reports have been produced into their experiences of higher education and their early career outcomes. The fifth inquiry will return to the cohort as they approach their first decade in the graduate labour market and will provide a comprehensive picture of their career histories to date, and an insight into their perceptions of whether their higher education has helped them succeed in their careers.
Dr Daria Luchinskaya is the joint academic lead on the new Futuretrack study. She said:
“The relationship between higher education and employment has become controversial, as the supply of graduates has increased more quickly than the number of roles available in occupations which require graduate skills and knowledge.
“The 5th stage of the Futuretrack survey will catch up with our Futuretrack cohort eight or nine years on from their graduation and help us to understand what is happening to graduates well beyond their first employment destinations. The data and our analysis will answer a pressing need for reliable and up-to-date information about the dynamics of the graduate labour market and, we hope, will inform policy in this area.”
The new Futuretrack wave aims to:
- Create an accurate picture of the kinds of jobs graduates are doing, and how they got them
- Explore how recession affects graduate employment
- Collect data on the longer-term impact of student debt on graduate careers
- Establish whether higher education has contributed to social mobility
- Compare the experiences of the Futuretrack cohort with students who graduated in 1995
The research will provide rich data for analysing the ways in which the changing nature of HE and the labour market has affected graduate employment through the specific combination of a nationally representative survey which can be linked back to previous Futuretrack waves, and in-depth interviews with selected respondents to explore their responses in more detail. It has also been designed to allow direct comparison with an earlier study carried out by IER among students who graduated in 1995.
For more details, visit the Futuretrack project website.
We have designed the study so that we can compare the experiences of our Futuretrack cohort with data from the IER Seven Years On study of the early career trajectories of students who graduated in 1995. These students entered the labour market during a period of economic growth, and carried no tuition fee debt into their working lives. Comparing their experiences with our Futuretrack cohort will help us understand more about the impact of debt, and enable us to look at whether higher education has contributed to social mobility.”Dr Daria Luchinskaya, Joint Academic Lead
