A scoping review of the graduate outcome literature

Higher education (HE) policymaking is increasingly concerned with graduate outcomes. Policies often use narrow economic metrics, such as employment rates and salaries, to set strategic goals for HE and assess ‘value for money’. Despite this policy relevance, little attempt has been made to assess the academic literature in this area. The field’s strengths and weaknesses, areas of focus and level of criticality are unknown, leaving us unable to judge its ability to inform policy. This paper addresses this gap using a novel two-phase scoping review method. Phase 1 assesses literature that explicitly uses the term ‘graduate outcome’, finding a field that is largely fragmented into subfields. Phase 2 then performs a series of ‘top-level’ scoping reviews on each sub-field and combines them to assess the ‘overall’ literature. This ‘overall’ literature is found to share HE policy’s focus on economic graduate outcomes. While several well-developed non-economic subfields exist, such as critical thinking and lifelong learning, these are comparatively small. A limited proportion of the literature considers issues of inequality and other ‘critical’ topics. If research is to better inform policy in this area, it would be beneficial to develop a broader and more critical research programme.