Demands for more data on international student outcomes are welcome, but such information isn’t cheap
The government has mislaid a series of ministers with responsibility for higher education over the past year, but this doesn’t mean universities have been forgotten. Last month, the Office for Students received a strategic guidance letter from education secretary Gavin Williamson (just three months after a letter from previous incumbent Damian Hinds) featuring sections on the Teaching Excellence Framework and Brexit.
The secretary asked for something particularly interesting. He put a welcome focus on international students, requiring action on wellbeing, mental health and ensuring they felt properly integrated on campus. And then the letter turned to employability.
International students should “receive the employability skills they need and [be] supported into employment, whether in their home country or the UK”, Williamson wrote. “It will, therefore, be critical to ensure the OfS makes public transparent data on the outcomes achieved by international students, including those studying wholly outside the UK, such as it does for domestic students.”
This is, in principle, a laudable aim. Who doesn’t want better data? But the requirement should be unpacked. What does it mean? Why don’t these data exist already? What would need to be done in order to get them?
Holy Grail
The first point to make is about something often overlooked. The UK has some of the best national-level graduate outcomes data in the world. And this kind of information is a Holy Grail for planners and employability professionals in every higher education system around the globe.
No country feels that its outcomes data on overseas students are good enough, and many look enviously at the kind of data the UK already possesses. This means there are few examples of systems that do this well and whose approach the UK can copy.
If it is to get a really robust set of data, the UK is going to have to work out how to do it itself. Certainly, these data are right at the top of the wish list of UK higher education data users, so in this respect the minister is only asking institutions to provide data they badly want already.
But what exactly do they want? Data on international students working in the UK? Data on UK students working overseas? Data on international students from the UK working overseas? Or is it all of the above?
Some of these are easier—a lot easier—to collect than others. And this gets to the heart of the question. Why, when institutions want these data, do they not already have them?
Well, actually, they do have some of them. Data on international students working in the UK have traditionally been collected on a voluntary (i.e. unfunded) basis as part of standard outcomes collection. Universities want these data, so they do take time to try to get hold of them, but the last Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education survey had about a 40 per cent response rate.
That gives enough data to analyse in theory, but because collection was voluntary the response was patchy. Response rates between institutions varied widely, so while the data are interesting they are not as robust as anyone would really like.
What they do make clear is that international students largely leave the UK on graduation, and those who stay in the country are much more likely than home students to work in London and to be in jobs associated with the London labour market—particularly financial services.
Barriers to surmount
At least because it has been possible to collect these data and because the issues with collection are known, there is a clear path to improving the process significantly. Unfortunately, and there will be a theme here, this will involve money—probably a great deal more money than has been spent on outcomes data in the past and probably a great deal more money than anyone wants to spend.
The simple issue is that to get these data is difficult, and getting difficult data is inevitably expensive—often very expensive.
There are several barriers, starting with finding the graduates in the first place. Usual practice is to start with graduates whose location is known.
This means, in the case of international students, those who are working in or around their graduating institution or who have got jobs directly through the institution. This finds some but not many—and plainly not a representative sample.
For home students, one of the next steps is often to contact home addresses. This is much more difficult for international students, with language barriers and other obstacles in place.
The next barriers are more subtle but often even more difficult to surmount. How do you record salaries? In home currency? In pounds? Which exchange rates do you use? Do you update them (especially in an economic climate where the pound’s value against other currencies is far from stable)? How often? Are occupations equivalent in other labour markets?
Universities UK has had a stab at this kind of examination with the International Graduate Outcomes 2019 report, which examines the destinations of 16,199 international graduates. This data collection was no easy task, and the authors are at pains to emphasise that it is a snapshot, but it does suggest that with enough skills and resources there might be a way clear to collecting such highly sought-after information to the benefit of universities and students alike.
But make no mistake, to do this properly will require an injection of cold, hard cash—lots of it. The fear is that even though everyone wants these data and all parties will benefit, collecting them might be an aspiration that never becomes reality.
Charlie Ball is a labour market specialist and sits on the Higher Education Statistics Agency’s Graduate Outcomes Steering Group.