Saturday 27 November 2010

The truth behind the Statistics

Recently a University (From now on label this university x) recorded that they had an 96.1% of graduates employed after they graduated, that is startling figure especially during the current graduate unemployment crisis.

But what does that statistic actually mean, does it mean that university x is a great university to go to if you are looking for full time job after you graduate or is that number extrapolated to justify that university x is a great university for employment. In my opinion it probably means both.

Students looking to go to university now should be weary about the future job prospects after they graduate. This might seem a strange thing to say, but by the time you have got through your first couple of years, you should have a mental and physical picture of what you want to do when you graduate, therefore the statistics of people employed should be a very useful guide on which university you want to go.

However there is more to these statistics that originally first thought?

What you have to consider is what the statistics do not take into account, is your job entirely related to your degree. Is this job part time / full time or even is this casual work, just to stop the annoying people who conduct the survey to stop bugging you.

Css-tricks conducted a survey based on how related is degree to current job. Of 5,500 votes casted online, 40% (2,187) said that it was not related and only 37% (2,011) said it was directly related. This suggests that graduates leaving university are most likely faced with going into a job which isn’t entirely related to your degree. Would you say this was money well spent?

It would also be interesting to see how many of the students were actually employed on graduate schemes? Obviously these figures would reveal the naked truth of our education system. Furthermore whether there are enough graduate schemes for the number of students coming through. Of course research organisations would be scared to release this information and the detrimental impact it could have.

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