The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Graduate Outcomes 2019/20

Although we saw only minor changes, the direction of those changes is worth noting. In most cases, the changes observed in the 2019/20 survey data go some way towards reversing the trends we saw in the 2018/19 data. Thus, unemployment (including those unemployed and due to start work or study), which had increased from 4.9% in 2017/18 to 6.7% in 2018/19, is down slightly in 2019/20, to 6.0% (although note that, due to rounding, this change is not visible in the figure above). Similarly, full-time employment, which had decreased from 58.8% to 56.2% between 2017/18 and 2018/19, has gone up to 57.1% in 2019/20. The full-time employment rate which we see in the 2019/20 data has not quite returned to the level of our pre-pandemic data, but employment rates may be recovering. This possibility is supported by ONS data covering the same period, which shows an overall employment rate for November 2021 which is 1.1 percentage points lower than before the pandemic, but 0.5 percentage points higher than in the previous year.[8] While we expected to see an increase in graduates pursuing further study in the face of labour market uncertainty, we saw no noticeable year-on-year change.

When we split our activity data by graduates’ personal characteristics, the small sizes of the groups in each activity category mean that changes between years did not lead to noticeable changes in the percentage of graduates in each group. That said, we can make a few observations. When we look at the activities of 2019/20 graduates in different age bands, we see the biggest (albeit still quite small) increases in full-time employment and decreases in unemployment amongst graduates aged 21-24, the same group whose full-time employment rate had fallen most sharply between 2017/18 and 2018/19. We see a similar trend when we look at activities by ethnicity, with White graduates seeing the sharpest decrease in full-time employment in 2018/19 and the sharpest increase in full-time employment in 2019/20.

A different story potentially emerges when we look at disability. Between 2017/18 and 2018/19, the biggest changes we saw were in the employment outcomes of graduates with no known disability, whose levels of full-time employment decreased, while their levels of part-time employment and unemployment increased. Between 2018/19 and 2019/20, on the other hand, the biggest changes we saw were in the employment outcomes of graduates with disabilities, whose levels of full-time employment, which had remained steady from 2017/18 to 2018/19, rose above the pre-pandemic baseline. This presents an interesting contrast to ONS data on employment rates for people with disability in the workforce as a whole, which are now returning to pre-pandemic levels, but only after a sharp drop in the second half of 2020.[9] It may be that, while the pandemic restricted employment opportunities for people with disabilities in the wider workforce, graduates with disabilities were better placed to benefit from the increasing potential for remote working in many professional occupations.[10]

Given the different contexts in which graduates in each of the four 2019/20 cohorts finished their higher education studies and were surveyed 15 months later, we also looked at the 2019/20 activity data on a cohort-by-cohort basis. In terms of both full-time employment and unemployment, we seem to see a difference between those graduates in cohorts A and B and those in survey cohorts C and D (Figure 8).

For the 2019/20 cohorts A and B, the rate of full-time employment is lower than it was for the equivalent 2018/19 cohorts, while unemployment is higher. 2019/20 cohorts C and D, however, have higher rates of full-time employment and lower rates of unemployment than their 2018/19 counterparts, and, in fact, look much like the equivalent 2017/18 cohorts. The explanation for this pattern seems to lie in the context under which the different cohorts were surveyed, with those who were surveyed under stringent pandemic restrictions, i.e., cohorts C and D in 2018/19 and cohorts A and B in 2019/20, experiencing relatively high rates of unemployment and relatively low rates of full-time employment. The rates of unemployment for the cohorts surveyed under restrictions are about a percentage point higher than those of the equivalent pre-pandemic cohort, while full-time employment rates are about a percentage point lower. The 2019/20 cohorts C and D may have graduated into lockdown, but they were surveyed under relatively loose restrictions, and, as far as employment outcomes are concerned, the relative lack of restrictions under which they were surveyed seems to have been more important than the difficult circumstances under which they finished their studies.

Employment by level and industry

The first years of the COVID-19 pandemic are known to have had an adverse effect on the labour market, with falls in employment in every over-16 age bracket between the start of the pandemic and the end of 2021.[11] From the Graduate Outcomes data for 2018/19 and 2019/20, we have seen that graduate employment was likewise affected, with slightly fewer graduates in full-time employment in the two ‘pandemic years’ than were in full-time employment before the pandemic began. Given that the employment impacts of the pandemic were not evenly distributed across different sectors of the economy, it therefore seemed sensible to ask whether we would see changes in the kinds of jobs held by graduates during the pandemic.[12]

The kinds of jobs carried out by graduates can be categorised in two different ways on the basis of Graduate Outcomes data. On the one hand, jobs fall into different Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) groups, which, broadly speaking, refer to the type and level of skill required to do a job. On the other hand, jobs contribute to different industries and consequently are assigned to different sections of the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC).

When we look at the percentage of graduates in employment working in different SOC groups over the past three years, we see very little change over time (Figure 9). Since many professional jobs and other jobs frequently held by graduates are among the jobs which could most easily be carried out remotely under lockdown restrictions, it is unsurprising that the percentage of graduates working in these occupations did not decrease after the start of the pandemic.[13] We saw increases of one percentage point each in employment in sales and customer service occupations and elementary occupations in the 2018/19 data, followed by a corresponding decrease in 2019/20; while this may reflect increased demand during the pandemic for certain occupations, such as supermarket cashiers and delivery drivers, it is just as likely that this represents normal year-on-year variation.

When we group the nine SOC major groups into three broad skill levels, we likewise see little change in the employment outcomes of graduates over the past three years (Figure 10). Around three quarters of graduates in employment are employed in highly skilled occupations; this was true for 2017/18 graduates and has remained fairly steady since the start of the pandemic. This echoes other research on the impact of the pandemic on the labour market, which shows that graduates in highly skilled occupations were shielded from some of the more drastic effects of the pandemic on employment.[14] Although we do see a dip in the proportion of graduates in highly skilled employment of one percentage point in 2018/19, followed by a rise of one percentage point in the following year, there is no reason to think that this goes beyond the level of variation that would normally be expected between one year and the next.

We expected to see slightly more noticeable changes in the industries in which graduates were working. Given that many arts venues and hospitality businesses were unable to operate as usual while pandemic restrictions were in force, we expected the percentage of graduates working in those industries to decrease. Conversely, given the high visibility of medical professions since the start of the pandemic, it seemed plausible that we might see more graduates working in health-related fields. We saw no notable change in the rate of graduate employment in accommodation and food service activities, but we did see a slight decrease (of 0.6 percentage points) in the 2018/19 data in graduates working in arts and entertainment and a slight increase (of 1.2 percentage points) in graduates working in human health and social work activities. These changes, however, like the changes we saw in occupational group, are so small that we cannot be sure they reflect anything beyond normal variation. Research by the ONS covering graduate employment during the pandemic comes to the same conclusion, noting that at ‘[the] aggregate level, graduates’ employment within industries has not been greatly affected by the pandemic.’[15]

Some subjects of study tend to feed graduates into certain occupations and industries, so it would have been interesting to assess whether there were any changes in activity during the pandemic for graduates who studied different subjects. However, HESA changed its subject coding frame from JACS to HECoS for the 2019/20 academic year, meaning that there is a break in subject coding between the 2017/18 and 2018/19 data and the 2019/20 data. Work is currently planned to assess the suitability of the Common [subject] Aggregation Hierarchy (CAH), our subject mapping system, to enable time-series analysis of subject data. Until that work is complete, we have reached the conclusion that we cannot confidently present subject time-series comparisons that span the change in subject coding frames.[16]

Graduate reflections and subjective wellbeing

The widespread shift to homeworking at the start of the first lockdown, coupled with the furloughing of many employees who could not work from home, has been thought to have had potentially lasting effects on people’s attitudes towards work.[17] At the same time, it is widely accepted that the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic over the past two years have extended beyond changes in economic activity and the health impacts of the virus itself to encompass mental health and subjective wellbeing. In last year’s analysis of the impact of the pandemic on the 2018/19 data, we looked at how responses to the graduate reflections and subjective wellbeing questions had changed since the start of the pandemic. We found few notable changes beyond a slight contraction in highly positive responses to the subjective wellbeing questions. This year, we have extended our analysis to see whether the different pandemic experiences of the 2019/20 graduates seem to have affected their responses.

The three graduate reflections questions ask graduates to what extent they feel their current activities are meaningful, fit with their future plans, and allow them to utilise what they have learned in their studies. When we compare responses to the graduate reflections questions for 2019/20 as a whole to responses from the previous two years, we see for all three questions a year-on-year decrease in the proportion of graduates who say they strongly agree and an increase in the proportion of graduates who say they agree, with the biggest differences between 2018/19 and 2019/20; the other three response categories have remained broadly stable over the three years of the survey.

At the cohort level, we see the biggest decreases in ‘strongly agree’ and increases in ‘agree’ since 2018/19 in cohort D of 2019/20, who were surveyed starting in September 2021 (Figures 11 to 13 below). Cohort A, who were surveyed starting in December 2020, show a slight increase in ‘strongly agree’ and a decrease in ‘agree’, when compared to the equivalent 2018/19 cohort. While we cannot be entirely certain about the reason for this difference between survey cohorts, it may be that the pandemic restrictions under which cohort A was surveyed tended to polarise their feelings about their activities; cohort D, who were surveyed under looser restrictions, in an atmosphere that felt increasingly normal, may have tended towards more moderate responses.

Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, the ONS has recorded generally lower levels of subjective wellbeing across society, with the sharpest decreases in wellbeing generally correlating with more stringent restrictions.[18] When we compared 2019/20 responses to the four subjective wellbeing questions with responses from earlier years, we saw a continuation of last year’s decrease in highly positive responses. For the questions about anxiety and happiness, we saw the biggest changes between 2017/18 and 2018/19, with less dramatic changes between 2018/19 and 2019/20; the other two questions showed a steadier year-on-year progression. Even as other aspects of life have started to return to normal, it seems that graduate subjective wellbeing has not started to return to pre-pandemic levels.

Looking at the four subjective wellbeing questions by cohort, the picture is slightly more complicated (Figures 14 to 17 below). Cohort A shows a particularly marked increase in graduates reporting high levels of anxiety and decreases in graduates reporting themselves as very happy or very satisfied with life. In cohort B, surveyed beginning in March 2021, we see an increase in the proportion of graduates reporting very low levels of anxiety, as well as increases in graduates reporting high or very high levels of happiness. Cohorts C and D show smaller changes between 2018/19 and 2019/20 than we see in the previous two cohorts. In cohort A, the contrast in subjective wellbeing which we see between 2018/19 and 2019/20 most likely reflects the difference between the pre-pandemic circumstances under which cohort A of 2018/19 was surveyed and the rising case numbers and tightening restrictions which marked the same period in the following year. When surveying for cohort B of 2019/20 began in March 2021, lockdown restrictions were still in place, but falling case numbers and the rapidly progressing vaccination programme may have allayed some anxiety and encouraged graduates to think more positively about their lives.

Given the disparate effects of the pandemic in different economic sectors, this year we also wanted to see whether the sectors in which graduates were working seemed to have any impact on how they were feeling, both about their activities and more generally. We hypothesised that graduates working in potentially stressful key roles during the pandemic would report high levels of anxiety and generally poor subjective wellbeing. On the other hand, we hypothesised that these same graduates would respond positively to the graduate reflections questions, since both the pandemic context itself and the resulting public focus on frontline workers will have encouraged graduates working in fields such as healthcare and education to see their work as meaningful. We also hypothesised that graduates working in areas largely shut down over the pandemic, including hospitality and performing arts, would both report low levels of subjective wellbeing and respond negatively to the graduate reflections questions.

In terms of both the graduate reflections and subjective wellbeing questions, however, we saw very little year-on-year variation in the patterns of response for graduates working in different industries. We observed slight increases in the proportion of graduates working in some fields who agree with the graduate reflections questions, but these increases do not necessarily result in a net increase in positive responses. While graduates working in education and human health show an increase in the proportion who agree that their current activity is meaningful, graduates in these industries show a corresponding decrease in the proportion who strongly agree with the statement. At the same time, while we see an increase in graduates working in human health who agree that their work fits with their future plans, we see a similar increase in the proportion of graduates in the same industry who strongly disagree with that statement. In other words, while there have been some changes in graduates’ assessment of their own circumstances over the past two years, these changes do not necessarily reflect the impact of the pandemic on particular industries.

Conclusions

Last year, as we investigated the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our second year of Graduate Outcomes data, we were looking to make sense of a seismic global event on a very new social survey. Like much of the rest of the world, HESA had switched to fully remote working in a hurry, and, while we still believed in the need for Graduate Outcomes data, we were only too aware of the disruption that the pandemic could cause, and we did not know how graduates were likely to respond when surveyed in turbulent times. We were relieved to find that response rates in the second year remained robust, and that, while we saw some year-on-year changes in activity and subjective wellbeing, those changes were not as drastic as we might have feared. At the same time, we remained somewhat cautious, aware that the pandemic was ongoing, and that the 2019/20 data might show further – and possibly different – kinds of disruption to graduate trajectories.

This year, we revisited the question of pandemic impacts under slightly different circumstances. While we were still interested in response rates and their implications for data quality, we also had new questions about the effect of the pandemic on a more recent cohort of graduates, who had finished their studies with the pandemic already underway. At the same time, we had a clearer sense of the wider effects of the pandemic in society, which helped us to shape our research questions; this year, instead of looking at graduates only in aggregate, we were able to delve more deeply into the experiences of graduates with different personal characteristics or working in different industries. There are some areas not covered by our investigation – we were not in a position to look at potential impacts on graduates from different parts of the UK or different socioeconomic backgrounds, nor did we look at the intersection of different types of disadvantage – but we hope nevertheless to have offered an overview of the impact of COVID-19 on the third year of Graduate Outcomes.

We expected to see more noticeable effects of the pandemic in the 2019/20 data than we saw in the previous year, now that we were looking at a full year of graduates surveyed during the pandemic, some of whom graduated into the first national lockdown. On the whole, however, that was not the case. Response rates across the board have remained steady or increased, and the minor variations in response rate which we see between different groups of graduates do not seem to correlate with particularly severe effects of the pandemic. While we expected to find that graduating into the pandemic would have an adverse effect on outcomes 15 months later, we saw, in fact, that employment rates for 2019/20 graduates were slightly higher than those of 2018/19 graduates. We saw a slight decline in highly positive answers to the graduate reflections and subjective wellbeing questions, suggesting that graduates’ subjective sense of recovery has lagged behind improvements in the labour market. Nevertheless, the changes which we saw in 2019/20 were smaller than the changes which we saw in 2018/19, and they do not seem to be driven by graduates working in any particular industry.

The 2019/20 Graduate Outcomes data, then, paints a picture of a graduate experience which has been changed by COVID-19, but neither beyond recognition nor as drastically as we might have expected in the first months of the pandemic. As we continue to collect Graduate Outcomes data in the coming years, we will continue to see graduates whose education and subsequent experiences in the labour market have been shaped by the pandemic in different ways. For now, the 2019/20 data, which continues to be representative of our target population, shows a cohort of graduates who are, despite the challenges of the past two years, working or studying at rates that are not far off those we saw in 2017/18, before the pandemic began. Through future assessment of our data, we hope to help our users not only to understand the ongoing effects of the pandemic, but also to understand what a normal year of Graduate Outcomes might look like.