Dear global education leader,
Do you have a paying job? What do you do? How much do you earn? These are among the questions the Higher Education Statistics Agency asks in its Graduate Outcomes survey, administered to students at British universities 15 months after graduation.
In an effort to get a more holistic picture of graduates, another group, IFF Research, this week released a different, but related survey: the inaugural Graduate Index (GI). The index measures seven dimensions of personal and social value for graduates, including social capital, civic engagement, confidence, resilience, quality of life, fulfilment and career progress.*
“Students go to university, not just to ‘get a degree to get a job’ but to become more rounded individuals equipped with the skills and nous to deal with whatever life has to offer them,” Catherine Turner, research director at IFF, wrote in Wonkhe. In conversations with universities, IFF found there was “a greater appetite for a different outcomes survey about people’s personal aspirations , more personal and social measures of success,” Turner told me.
There’s a lot of good data to explore, but some general findings:
- The subject a graduate studied appears to have greater bearing on the index score than the type of university they attended.
- The top three performing subjects on the GI are: Business and administrative studies, Medicine and Dentistry and Computer science.
- Engineering graduates have the lowest levels of civic engagement.
- Education graduates score 10 points higher than law students on fulfilment and five points higher on career progression.
- Mass communications and documentation graduates score poorly across the board.
- Male graduates achieve a higher GI score than female ones.
- There’s almost no variation between GI scores for white and black, Asian and minority ethnic populations.
Like all metrics, the GI has limits. It does not account for a student’s socioeconomic background or previous schooling, which clearly has significant influence over measures of fulfilment and confidence. Surveys are taken by humans who are swayed by things like whether they got a good night sleep or just failed an exam.
But the direction is positive, and in step with what we see in K12 with efforts like the Mastery Transcript which tries to provide a portfolio assessment of a student rather than a set of scores or list of sports and extracurriculars. These efforts attempt to paint a more nuanced picture of what education provides, and examine the wide variations within it.
Graduates can use this measure, hopefully in concert with other factors, to think about what qualities are most important to them: Confidence? Career progression? Fulfilment? Universities can get a better handle on where they are serving students — well, and not — by looking at different groups of students and areas of study. Overlaying this data with key demographics and socio-economic data can help to target support. Turner said universities that don’t rank high in the league tables can use the data to sell themselves in a more well rounded way.
Last week, in this letter, I railed against college rankings. I feel strongly that media companies like US News & World Report are driven by commercial interests (page views, supplemental revenue, ad revenue from the page views), not a commitment to teaching and learning. The GI does just the opposite. It attempts to go beyond one set of important measures, which are what graduates do and earn, to dig deeper into other outcomes, like a graduate’s sense of fulfilment. If the past year taught us anything, it’s that both measures matter a lot.
Stay curious,
Jenny
*The index uses a weighted sample survey of about 1,800 undergraduates and postgraduates three and five years after graduation.
