Die Zahlen, die belegen, dass die Gehälter der Hochschulabsolventen sinken

Full article, because I had to go around a paywall :

A graduate who has managed to get a job, unlike so many of them, typically started on £32,000, according to the Institute of Student Employers (ISE). In absolute terms, this is a 3.2 per cent rise from 2023-24 but a real-terms drop of £3,559 since 2021 when adjusted for inflation. If salaries had risen with inflation, this year’s graduates should be starting on £35,500.

Since 2015, graduate starting salaries have risen by 16.4 per cent, but have jumped by 56.6 per cent for school-leavers to an average of £23,000, according to the ISE’s survey of 145 employers in July. For those doing an internship or placement, often a year-long scheme that is part of their degree, it has jumped by 37 per cent to £24,080.

Stephen Isherwood, the chief executive of the ISE, whose members include the Bank of England, the BBC, BT, Network Rail, Deloitte, and Marks & Spencer, said: “The graduate jobs market is tough. There are a lot of students chasing a small number of vacancies.

“This data is evidence that school-leaver salaries are increasing at a faster rate than graduate salaries. Average graduate starting salaries have also not kept pace with inflation.”

The good news, he said, was that graduates could expect their salaries to rise sharply once on a graduate training programme. Within three years, they are typically earning £45,000.

Last year’s ISE survey showed that employers received an average of 91 applications per graduate vacancy, a 17 per cent increase on 2022-23 and the highest number since the ISE began collecting data in 1999.

Some companies received 200 applications per place and there was also fierce competition for work experience and internships, which they must do while they are at university to have a chance of getting a good job when they graduate. In the hunt for top talent, some City firms are now recruiting students on to internships in the spring of the first year of their degree.

The highest graduate starting salary reported by an employer to the survey — from a law firm — was £57,500. The lowest was £22,000 in the charities sector.

• Graduate salaries ranked by university and course

“The graduate jobs market is not growing much — that is what our report will show,” Isherwood said. “It is not shrinking. It is not into recession territory but it is not growing much either, so that could lead to the suppression of starting salaries. If an organisation has a limited budget for salary increases, it is likely they will focus that on existing employees.”

The rising number of applications is partly driven by graduates increasingly using artificial intelligence tools to write cover letters and bombard employers with them. About one in five candidates are using AI to help them fill in job applications or assessments, according to a report by Arctic Shores, one of the companies involved in recruiting and assessing graduates for employers.

To try to catch students using AI to apply for jobs, recruitment firms are searching for telltale “keywords” in an application, such as “furthermore” and “moreover” and phrases such as “highly innovative” or “cutting edge”. They also look for American spellings.

Isherwood said some applicants risked using “vanilla” phrases generated by AI. If they did get through the screening process and were hired, some were ending up in jobs they could not cope with, he said.

Jonathan Black, the head of the careers service at Oxford University, said the number of graduate vacancies on its website was the lowest for a decade. “We have seen a big drop in the number of graduate vacancies this year compared with last — from 9,000 live vacancies on our system a year to 6,000,” he said. They are planning a new scheme for students to apply for jobs in the charity sector in the next few months.

Isherwood said that white, privately educated men now faced greater competition for top jobs than in the past because companies were setting benchmarks to recruit higher numbers of female, ethnic minority and working-class graduates. “It is not that they are being discriminated against, but there is more competition for them and it is a fair competition,” he said.

A growing number of companies are also starting to measure the number of neurodiverse and LGBTQ graduates who they hire, he said.

Millie Wenlock, 21, is in the final year of a BSc in environmental science at the University of Stirling, and is planning a career as an environmental consultant. “I have a spreadsheet — a giant tracker list of all the opportunities and all the jobs I have applied to,” said Wenlock, who does not use AI. “So far I have applied for about 40 jobs and got two applications open at the moment.”

In my office team of 8 admins. 4 have degrees. One has a masters.

Tbf one of them is psychology. 2 are in business studies. The last one is in sociology.

All of them feel ripped off and lied to

Wages have stagnated for the past decade all across the spectrum. Graduates aren’t an exception. But I don’t feel like my fellow young people have really grasped that government policies which have disincentivised productivity growth are often policies that they support.

Surely one of the key lesson in ‘how successful has massively increasing those with degrees been’ would be to look at productivity over the period of the increase. We’ve completely stagnated which is hardly a ringing endorsement. Obviously there’s more factors to it but if it can’t make any realistic impact that what are we doing