IT'S ALL STATISTICS BUT DOES IT ADD UP?

May's edition of News and Views revealed the first official league tables on employability and showed that Bradford Graduates remained highly employable.

This month, Head of Careers Advisory Service, Ron Harle, discusses the difficulties arising from recent changes in criteria when collecting data.

"Colleagues may have seen national statistics published just before Easter and a report in last month's News and Views about the new performance indicators on employability. Bradford did well in comparison to the benchmarks, achieving 96 per cent employment or in further study.

The methodology for collecting data was changed last year by HESA to bring procedures into a directly comparable system. However, the downside of this for us is that we are now no longer able to use information supplied by departments or collected at degree ceremonies and we have to use a particular census date.

Comparable performance is important to Bradford and it proves that despite all the changes in the institutional profile over the last decade we are still up in the top group for employability. Nevertheless, we do feel that the quality of usable information for advising students, departments and for schools liaison and recruitment purposes has deteriorated under the new system. The proportion of those unknown has increased and the population group defined by HEFCE for the new performance indicator excludes a sizeable number of our successful students. Furthermore, the imposed delay in collecting information after graduation has resulted in less willingness to respond and a considerable increase in cost to the University through telephone follow-up to achieve a reasonable response rate.

We now have different sets of data, all valid but each taking a different reference point and presenting a different image. Taking the actual HESA agreed statistics gives us 65 per cent of our UK domiciled graduates in jobs. Eliminating the unknown gives a very sizeable increase to 77% in jobs. Add in those going on to further study and represent the figure as those available for work or study and we get to 94%. This percentage is not directly related to the performance indicator above, which was calculated by a factored formula.

So which figures do we use: - 65 per cent, 77 per cent or 94 per cent? Well it depends on how you define it, what question and how you reference the data. We need to be honest and to use our data with integrity, but providing we do not mislead ourselves reworking the information can have a positive and powerful marketing impact as shown below. The First Destination Summary to be published shortly will differ to previous years in producing alternative data formats - but please, when you use it, always qualify it with the appropriate statement and then you can honestly say it's true.

All the individual course summaries will be featured on our website at www.brad.ac.uk/admin/careers as soon as possible, and will be flagged on the University home page."


EXAMPLE Biomedical Sciences 2000
UK domiciled 105
of which in employment 58 plus in further study 22 = 80 = 76%

Reworked figures
UK domiciled 105, minus 2 Not Available, minus 21 Unknown = 82
In employment 58 plus further study 22 = 80
80/82 = 98%

* Figures derived from HESA first destination data representing proportion of UK domiciled graduates where destinations are known and available for work or further study.

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