Tuesday 11 September 2012

UK CS graduates are more unemployed than average 4 years out, and fewer go into education

To start with, it’s terrific that someone is actually trying to measure this. What happens to graduates four years after earning their first degrees? The UK has just come out with their report on what has happened to students who graduated 2006/2007. The results are surprisingly negative, summarized below. CS graduates are more unemployed than the average. They had a higher percentage of graduates in full-time employment, but a lower proportion of graduates who have returned for further studies. An interesting finding not in the summary below: 53.9% of CS graduates who returned for graduate study chose a field other than CS.

I dug deeper into the stats. Table 17 in the report lists where those students went that returned for graduate studies. 11.7% of CS grads who return to school go into Business.Only 7.9% of CS graduates went on for post-graduate work in education, compared to 9.9% of Bio graduates, 11.4% of Law grads, and 9.1% of Engineering grads. That’s an interesting finding for this blog — a smaller proportion of CS majors go back to become teachers. I’d love to know what the US stats are for this! The UK’s Higher Education Statistics Authority (HESA) has just published its longditudinal survey into the destinations and expectations of graduates from 2006/07.

By the winter of 2010/11, of all graduates from full-time courses in that year, just 3.8% were unemployed. But for computer science graduates the figure was a much higher 5.1%. Interestingly, the survey also shows just 3.7% of computer scientists remained (or were back) in full-time further study – compared to an average of 8.2% for all graduates. It’s not all bad news, 81.5% of computer science graduates were in full time employment four years on from their degree, compared to just 73.2% of all graduates. For maths graduates the figure is 73.1% and for physical science graduates it is just 66.0% – though a whopping 19.8% of them are in full-time education.

Deepa Singh
Business Developer
Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com

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