Careers services and their role in social mobility

Widening Participation (WP) graduates are often faced with challenges which can affect their employment outcomes and career readiness. How can careers services ensure these graduates are supported and encouraged to undertake career-enhancing opportunities?

Social mobility through higher education has become a core platform for successive governments keen to garner the economic and social benefits of a highly-skilled meritocracy. In what is set to be a highly influential report, the Bridge Group recently commented on the pivotal role played by university careers services in the engendering of social mobility through support for WP students.1

The issue is of central importance to universities. As well as ensuring a fairer society, social mobility is increasingly judged through league tables - particularly the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) - for the extent to which universities can prove 'distance travelled' by their students in learning and in career development.2

Initiatives have been put in place to slowly increase the number of school pupils going on to attend universities from the least advantaged areas of the UK, as well as increase participation by mature students, care leavers, first-generation scholars and students with disabilities.

Research by The Bridge Group has shown that the assumption that entry to university automatically confers access to the upper echelons of any career, which is the essence of social mobility, is largely mythical.3 Recent publications suggest that the key factor in economic and career success for early career graduates is prior educational attainment.4 This tends to be lower for WP entrants.

Even where students are academically outstanding, WP students face challenges around working long hours to ensure basic economic support, non-participation in co-curricular activities and low take-up of, or few opportunities for, paid internships. Issues of confidence and lacking a sense of entitlement can also have a negative impact on the outcomes for WP students.5

The Bridge Group's findings point to three key factors affecting the outcomes of WP students:

• Experience6 prior to university, and therefore career readiness and willingness to participate in career enhancing activities.
• Participation levels at university including extracurricular participation, work experience and internships.
• Employer recruitment practices.

In the case of employer recruitment practices, the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS) as a professional body and individual universities may have an advocacy role, encouraging employers to recruit from a wider range of institutions, publish information on the socio-economic backgrounds of graduate recruits and ring-fence internships for WP students.

Careers services are also well placed to tackle some of the issues raised in the research around promoting early participation of, and possibly pre-entry contact with, pupils holding offers.

The Bridge Group report demonstrates that there is a direct correlation between the speed at which students settle, and their participation in career-enhancing activities during their first year of study. The report also shows that participation levels remained constant throughout the course of their studies, i.e. low participation in the first year was mirrored in subsequent years, resulting in students missing out on activities highly valued by graduate employers.

In many ways, this is entirely understandable. For those who have no family history of higher education, or who find the transition to university difficult (either because they are away from home for the first time, or because they remain at home for economic reasons and see university as an extension of school), it is easy to see why braving the maelstrom of the average freshers' week societies fair, or signing up for co-curricular activities, is not immediately obvious.

Early intervention by careers services could have a profound impact on long-term outcomes for this cohort. Intervention could include pre-entry information and guidance to appropriate groups of students, early careers guidance and on-campus employment alongside a range of paid internships.

The Bridge Group report joins a growing body of evidence, suggesting that early interventions levelling the playing field for WP students might be sufficient to begin to turn the aspiration of social mobility into a reality.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of HECSU/Prospects

Notes

1. Bridge Group (May 2017). ‘Social Mobility and University Careers Services’, p.12.
2. Gov.uk, accessed 25 Aug 2017.
3. Bridge Group (May 2017), op. cit. p.6.
4. See particularly 'Shadbolt Review of Computer Sciences Degree Accreditation and Graduate Employability’ (Apr 2016)' which draws a direct correlation between higher entry tariffs and lower unemployment rates across all students. See also 'Employment and Earnings Outcomes of Higher Education Graduates by Subject and Institution: Experimental statistics using the Longitudinal Education Outcomes Data' (June 2017), from the Department for Education, which correlates earnings five years after graduation and entry tariffs.
5. Universities UK (Oct 2016). 'Working in Partnership: Enabling Social Mobility in Higher Education'.
6. The term 'experience' refers to the whole life experience of entrants and includes work experience, exposure to appropriate careers advice, participation in sports and hobbies and family background.

Written by

Janice Montgomery

Senior careers adviser

University of Aberdeen