What determines perceived graduate employability? Exploring the effects of personal characteristics, academic achievements and graduate skills in a survey experiment

ABSTRACT

Governments have become increasingly concerned with improving the employability of university graduates in recent years, but most existing studies of what graduate employers look for are limited by their reliance on self-reported preferences. This study, which focuses on the UK context, aims to develop our knowledge of the determinants of perceived graduate employability by measuring the relative importance for employability of a range of personal characteristics, work-related skills and academic achievements using a survey experiment in which graduate employers rated fictitious recent graduates based on a series of short written profiles. The experiment found large effects in the ratings of graduates in response to cues referring to study abroad, work experience, age, degree type, disability, and ethnicity. This suggests that, while there are some things universities can do to improve the employability of their graduates, they are also to a large extent at the mercy of structured inequalities in society.

KEYWORDS:

• Employability
• higher education
• graduate skills
• structured inequality
• survey experiments

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Katie Dhingra and the two anonymous referees for their useful suggestions and comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).