Understanding Graduate Outcomes from UK Higher Education: A Critical and Methodological Analysis

Abstract

Graduate outcomes are increasingly important within higher education (HE) policy in the UK. They feature within aspects of the new regulatory regime, including the Teaching Excellence Framework, as well as being recognised as the final stage of widening participation. However, current approaches to graduate outcomes are often framed in narrow economic terms, and have faced a number of criticisms within the academic literature. This thesis offers a critical and methodological analysis of graduate outcomes from UK HE. Specifically, it offers an assessment of the strengths and limitations of current conceptualisations and uses of graduate outcomes, and provides two empirical case studies to demonstrate how a more robust approach could be operationalised. The thesis begins by performing a scoping review of the existing literature in this area, before offering a robust way to conceptualise graduate outcomes from a critical realist perspective. A distinction between graduate functionings and graduate outcomes is advanced, which relates to the critical realist distinction between an event and a cause. These concepts are applied to two empirical cases (students' political attitudes and graduates' job quality) using a critical realist mixed methods approach. In terms of students' political attitudes, it is found that students tend to make small movements to the left and to become less ethnocentric during their time in HE. A study of undergraduate sociology students argued that some changes are influenced by the ways students engage with their course, and that important inequalities exist in this area. In terms of graduates' job quality, the thesis introduces a novel measure of job quality using data from the Graduate Outcome Survey. This is used to illustrate inequalities by educational background, gender, ethnicity, social class and disability in access to high-quality work.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Eric Lybeck (Supervisor), Steven Jones (Supervisor) & Nicola Banks (Supervisor)