In recent decades, governments have sought to increase the number of PhD graduates and support their transition into non-academic employment. The UK is no exception to this trend: investing significantly in doctoral funding, skills training and programme reform to facilitate progression into the non-academic labour market. To an extent, these…

Current understanding of international academic mobility tends to view migrant academics as career-oriented actors who can follow opportunities across borders with relative ease. This paper offers a more nuanced reading of international mobility in academia by analysing how the professional context influences migrant academics' decisions to come…

The increasing casualisation of academic labour over recent years has been noted across the global north. In the UK, this takes a number of forms, including fixed term, hourly paid and zero hours contracts. What tends to characterise them all, however, is a focus on the short-term. In this paper, we draw on a qualitative study with 20 UK-based…

This paper reflects on the systematic interconnections between creative workers and higher education institutions (HEIs). Despite the latter representing key intermediaries in creative industries' development and creative workers' career trajectories, the relationship between the two has rarely been framed in a relational and systemic framework.…

As massification of higher education developed, employment challenges in changing labour markets aroused the attention of scholars globally. An interdisciplinary approach called world-system theory is applied by scholars from the social sciences, history, anthropology and cultural studies. This study applied the theory in a bibliometric analysis…

This article models the migration flow of EEA students who graduated from masters and doctoral programmes in UK universities. The increased intra-European mobility of students and graduates is claimed to have crucial positive influence on building Europe's high-skill labour force, which in turn would strengthen its competency in the global…

Precarious employment is considered a social determinant impacting the health of workers, families and communities. The Academy is known to utilise non-standard employment contracts, coming under widespread criticism from its social partners for exploitative practices. Whilst there is much research suggesting certain groups (e.g. early career…

Some say that there are too many people going to university, and others have spent many years lamenting that they cannot find the graduates they need. What is the actual state of the graduate labour market? How many graduates actually are there? How is a graduate job defined, and how many people are there in them? And what does the future hold for…

Are some graduates going on to do non-graduate jobs? Evidence collected from interviews with universities careers services shows many have in fact seen an improvement in graduate employment -- specifically, in more graduates entering 'high skilled professions' and unemployment rates going down. Many universities have implemented a mandatory work…

Concerns over the supply of highly-skilled (HS) science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) workers are well established and have been a feature of policy discourse in the UK for more than 50 years. Since the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union, these concerns have been exacerbated by uncertainty about the movement of labour…

In recent years there has been an increased focus on students' transitions out of university and into the workplace. Policy changes have included the development of the Teaching Excellence Framework, the new "Graduate Outcomes" survey and the tracking of graduate salaries through the Longitudinal Educational Outcomes dataset. This report…

Historically, much of the focus of universities, policymakers and governments on higher education's impact on social mobility has been on disadvantaged students' access or admission to university, while focus on such students' successful participation and attainment is growing. The third phase beyond access and participation -- disadvantaged…

We quantify the returns to higher education for degree disciplines, namely 'professional' degrees, Medicine/Dentistry, Law, Accountancy and Psychology, within the UK from 2007 to 2015. We estimate the returns to education in the form of employment and wage premia associated with each subject. Our analysis contributes to the existing literature on…

This research paper is the fifth in a series produced as part of the Cedefop project The changing nature and role of VET (2016-18). Based on comparative analysis of labour force survey data from 2014, the report analyses the vocational effect on labour market and education outcomes, asking whether any advantages conferred by vocational…

University-to-work transitions tend to be discussed in terms of skills, outcomes and the readiness of graduates for an increasingly insecure and flexible labour market. Such a focus on individual attributes and orientations depicts graduates as lonely and ostensibly rational figures; disembedded from their intimate networks and devoid of emotional…