In 2009 the competition of getting a job among the university graduates was severest. Now the number of those who leave universities and will be out of work would increase doubly. There are warnings that up to 40,000 students who graduate from English universities this year will be seeking a work place six months after university.
Sarfraz Manzoor documented the lives of six students who graduated in 2009 to know their predictions for 2010 and their response to the reality. These six students studied at the University of Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan University and by the end of the year they were already cynical about higher education. Only one of these students was realistic about the state of the employment market while others were less practical, one of them claiming he would not work for less than £30,000 a year.
However, economic reality “pulverized” most of these optimistic expectations. One girl tried over 70 companies and she got positive responses only from two of them. The majority of companies offered unpaid work. Students were disappointed because they considered that if they have a degree, they will easily find a well-paid job.
Professor Kate Purcell, of Warwick University's Institute for Employment Research, said: "They have been encouraged to think that education has given them employability skills, so as well as learning about history or English or business studies they are also learning problem solving, developing communication skills, so they are pretty confident about themselves."
However, the results of interviews with employers who expressed their opinions on this year’s graduates were different. They said that many students lack confidence and are scared. "They think there are no opportunities out there so they apply for anything and everything and they don't really invest in the time to really look into each organization."
Will Corder, recruitment adviser at Kimberly-Clark, wrote in his custom essay: "Universities are still selling the idea to people that if they go to university they are guaranteed a great job at the end of it, and that is just not the case any more." According to a report called Fair Access to the Professions, chances of graduates of getting into one of the top professions, such as politics, law, the media or medicine, are influenced by background. The increasing numbers of graduates who want to get a well-paid job made the employers ask the employees to pass psychometric tests which help them to select candidates.
Nowadays 14.9% of graduates are unemployed and some of them consider that university had not properly equipped them for the hard world of getting a job. "The only career guidance we got was to write a CV each year for their records. I was taught nothing about how to succeed in interviews." The most surprising is that despite the reality, debt and recession most students would not have given up the chance to go to university because it helped them to become independent from their parents.
