Current debates about higher education (HE) and skills policy are concerned with the quantity of graduates produced, the value of their degrees and the rapidly changing landscape of the university fees system. In the context of the global financial crisis and the ensuing recession, the media has reported sensational rates of graduate unemployment, dubbing recent graduates part of the ‘Generation Crunch’ [e.g. 1,2]. But what are recent graduates actually doing, and how does this compare to those who graduated before the financial crisis? And how does the situation in the UK compare to Europe?

This empirical study seeks to map out where recent graduates (those graduating from first degrees at university) have ended up one year after their graduation. In addition to using data from the LFS, I will also map out where graduates from another comparable cohort have ended up in the labour market using data from the Futuretrack 2005 survey. Futuretrack is a longitudinal study carried out by the Institute for Employment Research (IER) and co-sponsored by the Higher Education Careers Service Unit (HECSU), which tracks higher education and employment experiences of people who applied to full-time undergraduate higher education courses through UCAS in 2005 and 2006.

The analysis will focus on the industry in which recent graduates work, how the job was obtained, whether they are looking for another job and why. This last issue can be used as a proxy for job satisfaction. The variables mentioned above will also be used when comparing recent graduates (class of 2008) to those who graduated just before the financial crisis and to those who do not have degree-level qualifications (e.g. people leaving school age 16 and age 18). It will also be possible to make some comparisons to cohorts who graduated in the 1990s, in the UK and in Europe [3, 4].

The main groups being investigated are those who are entering the labour market. While average employment statistics which include people who have been  economically active for some time could be an informative benchmark, it should be borne in mind that securing a job during a recession will be more difficult for new labour market entrants than for incumbents.

While the main focus is on UK graduates who completed their higher education in 2008, where possible I will compare the outcomes to similar groups in the Eurostat LFS to contextualise the findings. It will be particularly interesting to compare the situation in the UK to European countries which have similar HE systems, have gone through HE expansion and face high rates of graduate unemployment.

1. Barkham, P. and Curtis, P. (2009) ‘The Crunch Generation’, The Guardian, 10 January. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jan/10/graduate-careers-crisis-unemployment-recession [Accessed 01/02/2012]. 2. Kewin, J., Hughes, T. and Fletcher, T. (2010) Generation Crunch: the demand for recent graduates from SMEs, Leicester: Centre for Enterprise (CFE). 3. Purcell, K. and Elias, P. (2004) Seven years on: graduate careers in a changing labour market. Warwick: IER. 4. Schomburg, H. and Teichler, U. (eds.) (2006) Higher Education and Graduate Employment in Europe: Results from Graduate Surveys from Twelve Countries, Dordrecht: Springer. 5. Le Roux, B. and Rouanet, H. (2010) Multiple Correspondence Analysis, London: Sage. 6. Bourdieu, P. (1979) La Distinction, Paris : Les Editions de Minuit. 7. Lê, S., Josse, J. and Husson, F. (2008) ‘FactoMineR: An R Package for Multivariate Analysis’, Journal of Statistical Software, 25(1), pp. 1-18. Package available at: http://factominer.free.fr [Accessed 01/02/2012].