Memorandum 87
Submission from the Council for Industry
and Higher Education
THE STUDENT
EXPERIENCE
The Council for Industry and Higher Education
(CIHE) has not made a formal submission covering the whole range
of our work but would like to submit the attached reports as helpful
evidence to inform the work of the Select Committee. This Memorandum
summarises the evidence in those reports.
What employers want and what graduates offer
Employers are pleased with the overall quality of
graduates developed by UK higher education (HE). The National
Employer Skills Survey 2007 confirmed this—84% of employers
recruiting graduates thought them very well or well prepared for
work, compared with 67% of employers recruiting 16 year-old school
leavers. Other less robust surveys or anecdotes need to be viewed
against this evidence. That is not to say that the employability
of graduates could not be further enhanced and related to employer
needs.
Our report "Graduate Employability: What
do employers think and want?" noted that employers seek
graduates who have a range of competencies as well as subject
knowledge (where this is relevant). These include:
— communication skills
— team working skills
While they generally rate highly the intellectual
abilities of the graduates they recruit, they find too many of
them lacking adequate communication and team-working skills. This
confirms the views in CBI employment trends surveys.
It should be one of the purposes of higher education
to develop employable graduates and the student experience should
aim to achieve this objective. More learning might be undertaken
in teams, more presentation and communication built into the process
of learning and more learning to mirror the approach of problem
solving in teams which is the essence of the way the world of
work functions.
We suggest that all universities and
their career services should better signal to students early in
their time at university or college the capabilities that employers
seek in graduates, how the learning experience aims to meet those
needs and how the student can supplement that through on-campus
and off-campus experiences. Work placements or part-time paid
work can increase the employability of graduates and are welcome
by employers.
Developing globally aware UK graduates
We have stressed in a range of reports on the
theme of Global Horizons that universities should be developing
globally aware graduates and global citizens. This is a prime
function of a university in the modern interconnected world. It
is a way more enterprising graduates and postgraduates from all
nationalities can be developed as it is through multi-cultural
and multi-disciplinary teams and interchange that different ways
of thinking can be appreciated and new ideas and insights generated.
Employers increasingly seek graduates who have this global awareness,
who are sensitive to different cultures and who can work in cross-cultural
teams. Our report "Global Horizons and the Role of Employers"
brings together the employer evidence on this matter.
But UK domiciled students are in real danger of missing
out on the top jobs in global businesses because they lack this
global experience. They do not travel as part of their HE experience
as much as their peers from most other European countries and
universities have made less progress in developing teaching partnerships
and student exchange arrangements as they have in developing international
research partnerships. The EU Erasmus programme remains unbalanced
with many more EU students coming to the UK than UK students going
overseas.
Global employers welcome the quality of the
learning that underpins the UK HE system; but they note the mismatch
between what they increasingly seek from graduates in terms of
their global awareness and experiences and what UK graduates offer
and think is required.
We suggest that universities develop
more strategic partnerships with universities in other countries
so that more students and staff can be exchanged and the curricula
enriched through a greater global input.
International graduates
The UK has the potential to be the preferred
world-wide location for internationally mobile students and also
for global businesses who increasingly seek graduates from a range
of locations who can be deployed globally. But to realise this
potential, more needs to be done to raise the quality of the international
student experience, to better integrate all students on campus
and to increase the employability of international graduates.
The key messages for the Select Committee from our
report with i-graduate "Does the UK lead the world in
international education" are:
— international students view the UK as
offering a high quality if high cost experience;
— they consider that the quality of teaching,
learner support and student union support to be higher than offered
in other countries;
— but they consider that their integration
on campus and the development of their employability is less good
compared with other countries.
To some extent these results reflect the expectations
international students have of the countries where they aim to
study. The Careers Services suggest that some international students
have too high an expectation of what they will receive from studying
in the UK; this may reflect optimistic marketing by universities
on their websites or what they have been told by overseas marketing
agents.
Our report "Global Horizons for UK Universities"
suggested the issues that universities face as they develop their
international strategies, how these are being addressed and might
be addressed with existing practice shared. In particular it made
suggestions on how universities might better integrate students
on campus including on learning programmes. It noted that positive
action may be needed if international students are not to end
up in cliques.
The CIHE is currently undertaking work for DIUS
on how more UK businesses (and especially small companies) can
be persuaded to take an international student on a placement and
recruit more international graduates and postgraduates. This work
will lead to a marketing effort later this year with the aim of
helping businesses think through the skills strategies that might
be appropriate as they start to look beyond the current recession.
January 2009
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