2008 RGCC Forecast: Implications for employers

It is clearly not the intention of graduate employers to discriminate in favour of white, middle class candidates, however the current practices of targeting and applying a 2:1 cut-off to applications, achieves exactly that – as well as potentially writing-off too many male would-be applicants.

The discriminatory implications of targeting
The 30 campuses covered by High Fliers Research represent the universities most targeted by employers, and so reflect where graduate recruiters most focus their marketing and recruitment activity.

However the data has consistently shown that these campuses also represent a disproportionately middle class population as well as one which is disproportionately white. On a meritocratic basis, these campuses consistently take higher-achieving students, but as we have identified elsewhere, students from the higher socio-economic backgrounds get better A-level results. A similar pattern can be seen with when looking at ethnicity with white students outperforming non-white students.

The discriminatory implications of the 2:1 cut off
There is a natural temptation to apply blanket cut-offs in all areas of volume recruitment, and the 2:1 cut-off reduces the universe by 40%. However in three key aspects, the remaining 60% is an unrepresentative population, and without being able to justify specific job requirements for the cut-off, employers risk contravening equality legislation, let alone conflicting their own diversity agendas.

(a) Discriminatory by gender: 59% of all 2:1s and firsts are achieved by women. As we have demonstrated, women outperform men throughout the education system but the setting of an arbitrary threshold which discriminates against a specific gender is potentially open to a claim of indirect discrimination – where the typical legal threshold is 60/40.

(b) Discriminatory by class: The middle classes are more likely to attend university and when they are there, they will outperform those from other social backgrounds. 40% of all degrees awarded are 2:1's or firsts to students from social classes I and II – or put another way, these social classes represent just 33% of the population as a whole but 66% of the 2:1 and first cohort.

(c) Discriminatory by race: As we have repeatedly pointed out, those from a non-white background are less likely to attend university, and those that do are less likely than white students to achieve a 2:1 or better. To put it more starkly, 66% of white students ‘make the cut’ and achieve a 2:1 or better whereas only 41% of black students and 50% of Asian students achieve the same standard.

The 2:1 was never designed to be an indicator of employability
Academic classifications are intended to measure nothing other than a student's ability to study and understand a particular subject in detail. Academics will be the first to point that they are not – and have never intended to be – a proxy for employability. Academic study is also not intended to develop many of the personal aptitudes valued by employers, indeed excelling at academic study may in itself be a contra- indication.

The wide variation in the proportion of 1st and 2:1s awarded, based purely on the subject being studied, clearly shows that the 2:1 is not comparable across subjects, let alone across institutions.

Of even greater concern for UK PLC, is that universities themselves are now reporting that students are increasingly aware that achieving a 2:1 is so important to the extent that they are cutting themselves off from the wider aspects of university life. Universities themselves are often criticised for having become ‘teaching factories’ – this effect can only be exacerbated if students are focusing purely on the academic ‘production line’ and missing out on the wider development opportunities that are available whilst at university.