Graduates and the job market

Employers surveyed by Personnel Today claim that today's graduates' quality is too poor for them to be recruited. They cite three areas that graduates lack: skills, knowledge and attitude. If such is definitely the case inspite of high graduate unemployment then there is some clear missing link here. Assuming that the employers genuinely have high standard in their recruitment criteria, we have to question why degree education fails to equip graduates with the skills, knowledge and attitude they need to become employable.

Arguably, degree education does not have to purely cater for the job market. People may enter into a higher education establishment in pursuit of knowledge. With the degree, they have the option to choose between a graduate or non-graduate career. On the other hand, EUA in their Aarhus Declaration 2011 insists that (European) countries must invest in their higher education, especially in the economic crsis "...by striving for excellence in teaching, research and innovation, by offering opportunities to diverse groups of learners, and by providing the optimal creative environment for the talented young researchers that Europe needs universities are increasingly central to future growth and to the consolidation of Europe's knowledge society." Sure, there is demand from the society for qualified individuals to help progress its social and economic agenda which can be fulfilled by those with graduate calibre but can anyone tell how many degree-holding citizens we need to generate a per cent growth?.

Perhaps the survey result combined with graduate unemployment rate merely reflect the fact that the needs for population with higher education in the UK has been artificially inflated either by Britain's aspiration to catch up with Scandidavia's HE-educated population or by Labour governments' policies and their obsession with targets and results. Or maybe this is a natural process for a society weeding out redundancy in its higher education sector as Ian Jack of the Guardian anecdotally offered his observation about a "sports journalism" degree.