Executive summary
Graduates continue to earn more than non-graduates on average and for many a degree is the route to a high paid, and often enjoyable job. Successful graduates will often secure these higher earnings by entering one of the more prestigious and higher paid professions.
Access to these higher status and higher paid professions is unequal, with those from less advantaged backgrounds being less likely to secure such roles, as discussed by Alan Milburn in his 2009 report on fair access to the professions and his subsequent update. Whilst individuals from more advantaged socio-economic backgrounds continue to be more likely to secure a higher paid professional role, this will act as a break on social mobility, a point recognised in the recent Government White Paper Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers: A Strategy for Social Mobility.
This report examines the transitions that new graduates make as they leave university and enter the labour market. It investigates the extent to which on exit from university, students from different socio-economic backgrounds are more or less likely to enter a status occupation. For the purpose of this report, a high status occupation is defined as those in Standard Occupation Classification (SOC 2000) Group 1 and 2, however the report focuses on access to the very high status occupations (SOC Group 1) which include higher managerial occupations. This is however, a relatively crude measure, encompassing some roles that we may not define as high status. For some analyses we focus in on specific high status professions, such as the legal profession. A key problem though is to clarify more precisely what we mean by high status and in these data there are problems with small sample sizes when we consider individual occupations. Future work could usefully try to resolve these limitations.
The report uses data on first degree graduates leaving higher education in 2006/7 who have been surveyed at 6 months and 3 years after graduation. The data are from the Higher Education Statistics Agency Longitudinal Destination of Leavers from Higher Education and includes students graduating from Scottish, English and Welsh institutions.
The measures of a student’s socio-economic background used in the report are:
- The highest earning parent’s most recent occupation on the student’s entry to university as
measured by the National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC). - A proxy measure of socio-economic disadvantage, namely whether or not the student lived
in an area with low HE participation when they applied to go to university. - Whether or not they attended a state school just prior to going to university.