Graduate salaries are no measure of a university's worth
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Loading... - Siomi Kennedy
- 03 Oct 2021
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The government’s teaching excellence framework may have been controversial, but it has enabled the higher education sector to articulate what students, parents and industry are genuinely interested in: teaching, employability, student support, real-world skills and co-curricular activities. Importantly, it has also sought to evaluate universities based on what their students say.
Given higher education’s continuing struggle to gain public recognition for its work and for the value for money represented by a university education, it has been an important development.
But the government’s latest proposal looks set to undo that progress. The Office for Students has suggested that Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data will be used as a core set of metrics for the new subject-level Tef assessment.
This is a worrying development, because LEO is a set of statistics that compares the salaries university graduates earn with their degree subject and the university they attended.
It is at best counter-intuitive – and at worst deeply unfair – that this controversial, flawed and still experimental data is likely to be given such weight in a process that was established to assess teaching excellence in a fair, unbiased way.
Graduate earnings cannot offer an accurate reflection of a university’s quality of teaching, and they are not a measure of the added value of a university degree. This data is actually a reflection of the relationship between a regional labour market, the type of employment undertaken and a graduate’s socio-economic background.
LEO is also a historical data set: there is no reason to assume that past earnings are a predictor of future earnings, which will depend on factors such as the economy, technology, political circumstances and the job market.
The government recently published its industrial strategy white paper, which emphasises the critical role universities must play in supporting combined authorities and local enterprise partnerships in developing strategies.
This will be undermined if LEO is introduced as a Tef metric, as it will exacerbate regional imbalances. Institutions in London and the south-east will be unfairly privileged, since they are based in the area with the most highly paid local labour market in the country.
The impact on social mobility will be even more profound, with many universities potentially being discouraged from recruiting students from more disadvantaged backgrounds. A graduate’s age, family, socio-economic background, gender, ethnicity and prior attainment are all factors that significantly affect earnings. Universities with proud records of significantly widening access to higher education to those from traditionally disadvantaged backgrounds will be penalised by the new metric.
And what of those providers that offer critical subjects with traditionally lower earnings, such as nursing or midwifery? What of the arts and humanities?
The inclusion of LEO data in the Tef assumes that a university education is fundamentally about economic success, as opposed to learning and development.
This isn’t to say that LEO is without value. Prospective students who want to experience the rich variety of higher education may also wish to understand more about the labour market they intend to enter and their potential future earnings. It is essential, though, that this information is not assumed to be a proxy for individual universities’ performance.
Analysis of the most recent release of LEO data shows that it is complex, volatile, unpredictable and unreliable at provider level, sector level and across different census points.
These characteristics provide no sensible way of tracking causation, precluding any serious engagement with the data and preventing its use in the development of strategy or the monitoring of teaching quality.
If the Office for Students wants to reflect the teaching excellence of universities in an accurate way, it should decide against the use of LEO data. This is the best way to celebrate an education that provides students of all backgrounds with the opportunity to fulfil their potential in such rich and diverse ways.
