What’s the point of a degree?

Does going to university make you more employable, or just put off the day you join the dole queue? Helen Connor reports.

You’ve just failed to get into either of your chosen universities, and you must be feeling pretty low. Some of your friends have started work and are flashing their money around. You are facing three or more years somewhere you hadn’t planned to go. Should you just throw in the towel, rip up the clearing form and get on with looking for a job?

No, no and no. At least, not without thinking about it. a degree will not guarantee that you get a better job, or that you get a job at all, but it should give you a distinct advantage in the labour market.

Firstly, it makes it possible to enter a wider range of occupations, particularly management and the professions. Entry to most of the latter (law, accountancy and teaching, for example), is now virtually barred to non-graduates. Elsewhere in financial services or public administration, say, employers are increasingly recruiting graduates to positions that were once filled largely for school-leavers.

Secondly, graduates earn more on average, and the earnings gap between qualified and unqualified people in the UK is widening. It pays to get higher levels of skill and qualifications, and the demand for skilled and educated labour is increasing.

Thirdly, graduates are much less likely to be unemployed than non-graduates: the unemployment rate among degree-holders in the workforce, at for per cent, is less than half that for those without degrees. What’s more, demand is likely to increase for high-level skills, as new technology is introduced, businesses restructure and international competition intensifies. Graduate-level ability is being required in a growing share of all jobs. Some of the occupational groups predicted to grow fastest in the Nineties employ mainly highly qualified people. Almost 1.4 million extra jobs are expected to appear in professional, managerial and technical occupations by the turn of the century, compared with a fall of 86,000 in clerical and secretarial occupations.

The outlook, then, is generally good for would-be students. But no individual can be sure of finding fulfilling employment at the end of his or her studies, The recruitment market is likely to remain very competitive, with the supply of graduates expected to grow faster than demand over the next few years. Although initial unemployment of graduates is now falling, the average is still above that of the late Eighties. Also, there] is emerging evidence that a significant number of graduates feel underemployed in their jobs at least at first, and find their new careers make too little use of the skills and knowledge they acquired at university.

Graduates are going to a much wider range of jobs and employers than was previously the case, often displacing less qualified people. The proportion entering traditional graduate trainee/entry schemes in large" firms has fallen. More are entering small firms that previously did not employ any graduates, going into self-employment, or taking up temporary or fixed-term positions. Because of this, and the disappearance of traditional career ladders in large firms, graduates' early career paths are more varied than they were, say, ten years ago.

In a competitive, albeit growing, graduate job market, securing the first real job can be a major challenge. Taking a postgraduate qualification, especially in a vocational subject, or one of the conversion IT courses, has helped in the past, although it is not a guarantee of easy entry into the labour market. Similarly, first-degree graduates from disciplines such as IT, engineering and business-oriented social sciences have generally fared better than those from other disciplines, although much depends on the qualities of the individual.

The trend is towards a growing proportion of jobs being open to graduates from any discipline, with employers putting more emphasis on personal skills such as communication, teamworking, business-awareness and self-reliance. If you want to make sure the next three or so years are not a waste of time, develop your personal skills, раrticularly through work experience. Get as much advice and information as possible from your graduate careers service — the earlier the better. Develop a job-hunting and career-planning strategy. Study hard. And try to enjoy yourself.

9.b Match the words in the left and right columns to restore the collocations from the text. In what context are they used?

9.c Discuss the following questions with a partner. Use the information from the text, your background knowledge and other sources of information:

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