by CONOR KING
“Do graduates have jobs that require a degree?” is a perennial question that haunts higher education. As Jason Clare grapples with how to ensure a post school education system that all access he will face arguments, within and without, that too many are too educated.
The assumption is that jobs are nice, defined, beasts that the employee is to be fitted to. The focus on the job not the person comes across as particularly functional, especially when set against claims for graduates’ capacity for creativity and problem solving. It is meant to be a hard headed analysis, at risk of simply being thick headed.
I have always found it difficult to be sure what it means to need a degree for a job, rather than be advantaged by it.
My first job was filing RAAF medical records. The one person with the requisite lack of qualifications in the room hated it and did least; we others engaged in sociological study of air force medical needs as we reduced the piles of back files. Conversely, position descriptions for university advocacy roles all presume a degree, if not a postgraduate award. Yet the person who defined 21st century university advocacy had no degree; his successor was a professor with all accoutrements. The lack or presence of the degree respectively told for each – in positive and not so positive ways.
Easy to consider the anecdote; how to gauge the reality.
The ABS’s classification of occupations provides a starting point that strongly supports graduates are finding relevant employment.
It considers two groups require a bachelor degree or higher, managers and professionals, of which the latter is most relevant for recent graduates. Compared with previous decades the professionals classification has become the most common by far, rising from 15 per cent of jobs in the mid 1980s to 26 per cent in 2022, during which time the gender balance has reversed from 56:44 men to women to 45:55.
Those two comprise almost 40 per cent of all employment (May 2022) while there are six groups for the other 60 per cent of jobs where lower skill levels are expected. In a workforce where over a third, heading to half, are graduates the classification has become unbalanced and needs a revamp.
As far as I understand, a profession is a trade that requires a higher education degree and a vocation is a trade that requires a vocational qualification. The list of which is which continues to change – sometimes we forget lawyers and doctors were once apprenticed to aged worthies for instruction and guidance. Only clerics can boast of a thousand year tradition of university training.
“Professional” works best for graduates with a specific vocational skill set, where it is easier to see application of those skills but which throws open questions when these graduates move onto other roles. Is the education just relevant for the specific time spent as a physiotherapist or engineer or continue to influence subsequent roles?
Those with generalist degrees find employment across numerous roles. The lists of professions struggles to capture these: “intelligence and policy analysts” and “management and organisation analysts” sitting next to “librarians” as “information and organisation” professionals. A better way to capture the array of analysis based, problem solving roles that now proliferate is needed, not burdened by the implication of a person delivering a specialised service as a profession.
This links to the likelihood that many graduates fit into the service and clerical worker classifications where they are open to the charge of not needing their degree. The community and personal services classification has grown, particularly for women, to be 11 per cent of jobs.
Can a graduate alter the shape of a role? As graduates fill more and more of the roles the ABS deems caring and clerical are those roles developing to use the greater formal skill set or is the degree redundant?
Rather than ask whether a job require a degree, the more useful question is what could a graduate bring to the role that would be sufficient reason for the higher level of education.
This approach is to posit the employee as the asset around whom the job can be structured. Reality is a dialectical tussle between the two, as what could be done adjusts and adapts to what those available to do it can do.
This is not to ignore the personal value from education but to address directly arguments for limits to the return from education.
That employers may be aware of this is suggested by the Employer Satisfaction Survey . Those employers who respond rate graduates well, more highly than the graduates rate the use of their skills. Employers may state what they expect to see; they may well be better at knowing how the graduate outcome assists. The graduates may have over-excited concepts of what work draws on their degree and what does not. There is no escaping that the dull work has to be done, especially when the lower level roles devoted solely to it have been removed.
Part of the problem is the ongoing assumption that graduates are rare rather than common. There is concern that the nice graduates are being squeezed out of good employment by the mass of competitors, as if there were a right to a role by fact of gaining entry to the course initially. Similar fears often underlie the desire to push people from areas of low education attainment away from higher education to VET, while retaining the very high transition to higher education elsewhere. People should be able to make a balanced considered choice between higher education and vocational, or choose both.
What matters is the steady rise in real earnings and societal wealth. It has been a clear signal that the increased education attainment of the workforce at least correlated and likely contributed to that outcome. Recent stagnant times challenge the ease of that outcome, albeit the statistics are more positive than the societal feel. It may well be that a degree is now more important to preserve income levels than to raise it.
Conor King, Director of Tertiary Education Analysis @ [email protected]