"The Governor View" - Student outcomes and employability

Advance HE Governor View: Student outcomes and employability 

Good student outcomes are central to the higher education mission and are increasingly the focus of regulatory scrutiny. 

Careers and employability offer one of the most tangible micro and macro benefits of going to university, evidence that it can drive social mobility and economic prosperity.

In England, universities must meet the B3 Conditions of registration, introduced by the Office for Students in 2023, which lay out the proportions of various categories of graduates that are expected to move to professional jobs or further study.

As well coming under the microscope from a compliance perspective, graduate employability and salary levels feed into formal and informal league tables and are increasingly the subject of intense media scrutiny.

In the current “brutal” jobs market, stories of graduates with first class degrees failing to find professional employment can present a reputational risk and also fuel wider debates about the value of higher education, the size of student debt repayment and the “oversupply” of graduates.

In the 2025 Advance HE/Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) student academic survey, one in five of respondents who perceived poor value for money cited disappointment with their career prospects.

These factors serve to elevate even further the vital importance of strong oversight of the structures, policies, processes and initiatives that contribute to student outcomes, and ensure they are at the forefront of governors’ considerations.

Governors who spoke to Advance HE on these issues invariably described graduate employability as “a top priority”, “a core mission” and “part of the bricks of the university”.

At many institutions, graduate employment rates are key performance indicators and part of strategic planning, ensuring they are monitored and discussed at regular intervals in board meetings.

Student outcomes and employability may also feature in risk registers, guaranteeing greater scrutiny from audit committees.   

“Our audit committee looks in detail at a range of areas, including employability outcomes,” said a governor in London. “The audit committee reports into the board so there is a multifaceted approach to ensure proper governance and scrutiny of employability and how it ties into the delivery of the academic portfolio and how well we're performing as a university.”

Governors reported receiving updates from heads/directors of the careers service. The details these senior managers provide on how employability is integrated into undergraduate courses, the prevalence of placements and work experience and industry partnerships, give governors a more complete picture than the metrics can provide.

“We might well have a couple of hours before the formal board meeting where you are brought up to speed on a subject and employability is one of those topics that benefits from a wider conversation,” said a recent ex-governor at a Russell Group university. “If you are only looking at the published data, it is often not up to date and groups of students might be missing, such as international students or those who are self employed.”

Other board members confirm that metrics can only tell part of the story. Given this, concerns were raised that using employability as a proxy for quality in accountability measures fails to take into account factors that are beyond the control of institutions and unfairly penalises some over others.

A governor from Scotland argues that while employment rates are important information for prospective students, the idea that courses that do not lead to high rates of graduate-level employability are of lesser quality or value for students to study is reductive.

“I start from the premise that levels of graduate employment are not a proxy for the value or quality of the courses from which people graduate,” he said. “In Scotland we’ve moved away a bit from targets in outcome agreements to an analysis of how individual institutions have performed in the past. It is an assurance model that says ‘how have you been doing, what are the trends here and have you been improving or not improving?’.”

While B3 registration conditions apply across the board in England, in Scotland, institutions include employability measures in outcome agreements drawn up with the Scottish Funding Council. The details set out in these agreements, along with relevant performance indicators, and institutional strategy, guide university approaches and performance monitoring.

“We have a percentage target associated with movement up, down or sideways,” says a chair at a Scottish university. “One relates to graduate level employment and another to the gross percentage of people in employment/further study. This governance mechanism we have in place enables the governors to say ‘we’ve got a problem in this area - what are we doing, what do we need to put in place and do we need to refocus resources?’.”

This chair highlights the tension, also apparent in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, between the push to improve graduate level employment rates and the access and inclusion agenda. 

“The nature of the tension, and I’m going to generalise, is that many students from deprived backgrounds commute to campus and don’t have large amounts of money enabling them to easily move around,” he said. “What that means is that a student from this sort of background who wants to get a graduate level job may not be in a position to uproot themselves and move to a different city.”

Progression data, then, is to some degree reliant on the local economy and the level of graduate level jobs in it. 

“There are many students who will prefer to get a job as a barista in a local café than go to a city where the graduate jobs are better, but which involves a series of costs and risks to the individual concerned,” says a board member.

A governor of a private university in England makes a similar point, raising concerns about OfS proposals for the next iteration of the Teaching Excellence Framework that include criteria relating to employability and salary levels.

“It is terrible problem that you might be judged on the earnings of a sizable proportion of graduates who stay in a locality with low graduate employment opportunities,” he says. “The implication is that you should be telling these students to go elsewhere, yet, on the other hand, universities are told to act more civically and with more cognisance of local needs with the aim of boosting local economies. It is the tyranny of metrics.”

A recently published report by the Graduate Futures Institute (GFI), formerly the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services, calls on institutions to ensure that employability is a “university-wide” concern. Governor respondents are clear that it is. 

One board chair describes a very popular microcredential at his institution which helps students match the skills that are being developed in their degree course to employment opportunities. 

Placements, work experience and internships in a variety of industries means “we are sending our undergraduates to spend periods in the world of work and we are always trying to do as much of that as we can”. Academics are fully onboard, not least because the institution publishes marketing statistics which give employment rates on different courses.

“It is all fed into the offer that we make to perspective student,” he says. “One of the reasons we suggest a student comes to us is that they will leave with a career not just a degree. We have to focus on things that will land you a job, such as work placements and industry exposure. Across a typical modern university, I’d argue that employability is built in with the bricks and academics are entirely aligned to it. All of them are very open to industry collaboration.”

At one university in London, listening to the student voice helps to ensure that governors understand what is at stake in the university-wide push for improved student experiences and outcomes.

“One of the recommendations from our external review of governance was the role of diverse and stakeholder voices in terms of driving continuous improvement,” she said. “What we've implemented is that when the student union president gives regular updates, it's not just a list of things but actually includes student testimony, students’ stories, to bring some of this to life. I think governors need to have the stories to help them understand what the issues are.”

The Graduate Futures Institute (GFI) report has found that universities are “stepping up” their support in response to the UK’s “tough economy”.  

Action taken ranges from helping students build their CV and developing networking skills, to teaching about labour market information, and conducting mock interviews. Some 45 per cent of its members now offer lifetime support to graduates looking for careers support, up from 41 per cent in 2024-25. 

Its analysis calculated that 952,169 students have accessed careers information by visiting their university’s online careers resource, while more than 215,000 students attended a one-to-one guidance appointment during the 2024-25 academic year.

Different students face different challenges in their search for worthwhile employment or further study, and many universities try to tailor careers support to overcome potential barriers. 

Universities are collaborating to formulate strategies to improve access to postgraduate courses for under-represented groups. 

Meanwhile Medr, the new tertiary education regulator in Wales, has made boosting employability skills of under-represented groups a priority with a £2 million budget for 2025/26 to be distributed to universities in the principality for targeted support.

Industry engagement is a key plank in institutions’ employability strategies in Wales, and elsewhere.

In the quest for financial sustainability, regional growth, and enhanced employment opportunities, universities are trying to build long-term business alliances, particularly in the high-growth sectors, such as AI, advanced manufacturing, and green energy. In England, degree apprenticeship numbers are up by 20 per cent, according to government figures published at the end of last year.

Increased activity is also evidenced in the 2025 report from the National Centre for University and Business. It revealed that 81,499 interactions between universities and businesses were recorded in 2023/24, an increase of more than 6 per cent on the year before.

“There is a lot more focus on employability and how to support it,” said a board member from a new university. “Helping graduates in a competitive job environment is a core mission. It’s an area where student, university, business, government and regulator perspectives are aligned.