VIRTUAL EVENT: What does ‘employability’ mean amid a global pandemic and recession?

Graduate employability dominated the international higher education (HE) policy landscape over the last two decades. Governments see HE as a means of ensuring a skilled, work ready labour force. Students increasingly demand job-related financial returns from their ‘investments’ in HE, and graduate labour market outcomes are now a key metric for regulation and ranking in many countries. 

However, COVID-19 has a major impact on the graduate labour market. A global recession is predicted, countries’ GDPs are plunging, unemployment levels are rising. In the UK alone, the number of vacancies dropped by nearly 50 per cent in the first quarter of the year, and plans from major graduate recruiters and particularly small and medium sized enterprises are in turmoil. 

The reality is that many graduates leaving higher education in 2020 and 2021 will struggle to find graduate level employment, or any job at all. 

History shows that graduates who attempt to enter the labour market at times like this not only face significant early challenges, there can be a significant scarring of long-term career trajectories and life-time earnings. Such impacts are rarely evenly distributed and can deepen existing social and regional inequalities.

The panel of experts will discuss the following questions related to the crisis of employability, and they invite your participation.

• What can individual students and graduates do and how should higher education institutions and systems respond? 
• In the middle of this crisis of employability how can higher education broaden expectations about its contribution to individual graduate agency and the broader public good?

Speakers

• Golo Henseke, Senior Research Associate (Applied Economist) UCL Institute of Education 
• James Robson, Departmental Lecturer in Higher Education at the University of Oxford and Associate Director of SKOPE
• Anna Vignoles, Professor of Education at the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Trustee of the Nuffield Foundation

Links

• Centre for Global Higher Education
• Department of Education, Practice and Society

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