It took Donald only a few months to discover that he did not want to
pursue a career in computer science, although he had studied it for four
years at the University of St Andrews. But by then he was already working
as a development programmer for the software company Logica, at its offices
in Cobham, Surrey.
‘I started in September, and struggled through until Christmas, then
came home to Edinburgh for a couple of weeks. After that work just felt
uncomfortable.’ He resigned in January, disillusioned with the job. Yet
shouldn’t his degree have prepared him for it?
‘I hadn’t come to terms with what doing it every day would mean,’ says
Donald, who prefers to remain anonymous. ‘It was a kind of technically-able
sweatshop, in that I was working on a large one-off Ministry of Defence
project with 50 staff all doing a little bit. I was expecting something
a little wider.’
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Wider? To many of the three million registered unemployed people in
Britain, Donald’s complaint might sound absurd, and his giving up a £14
000 salary, just because the job didn’t match his initial expectations,
folly.
Vernon Martinus, Logica’s graduate recruitment manager, says the case
is unusual. ‘Quite a few come on board raring to go and change the world.
We don’t kid them that they will. The reality of coming into industry is
quite different.’ As Logica has 2600 staff in Britain, it would be a surprise
if the 150-odd graduates employed each year did manage to make their mark.
But the anecdotal and statistical evidence suggests that Britain is
failing to strengthen its commercial science base – which creates wealth
through the effect it has on manufacturing industry – because a significant
proportion of new graduates in science and engineering are not attracted
to jobs in science, perhaps for financial or intellectual reasons, or because
the career prospects seem poor.
Belatedly, the government has acknowledged the problem. Early in March,
John Major said in an interview with The Independent that ‘unless we remain
at the edge of technology and as a fiercely competitive nation we will not
grow and thrive throughout the 1990s . . . We have undervalued manual skill,
engineering skills. People have left university and what have their parents
said to them? ‘Well, you go for a jolly good job in the City or in Fleet
Street or somewhere like that . . .”
Science and engineering expertise gives manufacturers a competitive
edge. And service industries depend heavily on the manufacturing industries.
Even in currency trading, that most ethereal of activities, someone has
first to build offices and make the computers and telephones. Also, in a
recession, service industries are squeezed first (a restaurant that starts
losing business cannot look for export markets, nor increase productivity
significantly: a waiter can only serve so many tables at once). Recovery
is driven by manufacturing. But graduates are turning their backs on manufacturing
industry.
Where are they going? Although the figures for 1992 will not be available
before April, those for 1991 show that, of the 19 257 British graduates
in physical and biological sciences and engineering, 26 per cent continued
in further research. Altogether 43 per cent went into full-time employment
– but of those, 42 per cent went into jobs outside science or engineering,
such as finance, administration and selling. The situation was worst among
physical scientists (where 60 per cent of full-time workers took up jobs
outside science) and best among engineers (where they made up 25 per cent).
The long-term trends are unclear, but with unemployment among graduates
increasing, look unlikely to improve. Take, for example, the case of James
Richie, who was at St Andrews at the same time as Donald, but on a four-year
physics and electronics course. He is now studying to be a chartered accountant
with Coopers & Lybrand in Edinburgh.
Driven off track
His father is an electrical engineer. ‘He probably influenced me at
school,’ says Richie. So why become an accountant? ‘I was always thinking
about doing this when I went to university,’ he explains. ‘My uncle works
in merchant banking in Edinburgh. My dad probably influenced me to do electronics
at school. First I chose to go to St Andrews, and then chose the degree
course.’ Why? ‘I’m a keen golfer.’ (St Andrews is the site of the Old Course,
possibly the oldest golf course in the world, which is open to the public.)
He finished as captain of the Scottish Universities’ golf team, with a 1
handicap and a 2:1 honours degree.
He does not feel that by choosing accountancy he is rejecting science:
‘I wanted to go into the financial field, but I could now go into industry
or management such as physics or electronics companies.’ Obviously the principal
attraction was the career prospects, rather than the initial salary ( £9300).
However, according to Incomes Data Services, a London-based research company
investigating pay trends, within three years he could probably expect to
earn double, and almost certainly overtake fellow graduates who went into
science jobs.
Or take Mary Loose-more, 23, who earned a First after her four-year
course in physics and history, also at St Andrews. She is now starting a
conversion course in Law at Chester. She had decided to do law by the time
she did her A-levels (in maths and physics). Why not science as a career?
‘I wanted to do something that used all my skills,’ she says. What if she
hadn’t got a place on a law course? ‘Accountancy,’ she says firmly. ‘But
that was oversubscribed anyway. Or I could have done teaching, but my mother’s
a teacher, so I haven’t got a very positive feeling about it as a career:
morale in the profession isn’t high. I wanted to work with people who were
happy with what they were doing.’
Last year’s science and engineering graduates have hardly seen an encouraging
piece of economic news since they began their courses – which for most was
October 1989, just as the downturn was starting. Since then, the picture
has become bleaker. There are more graduates and fewer jobs. A survey of
over 100 blue-chip manufacturing, finance and public employers by IDS* found
that in 1992 their graduate recruitment (of all disciplines, not just science)
fell by 16 per cent, from 4550 in 1991 to 3861. According to the Unemployment
Unit, the proportion of graduates under 25 without work is now 17.5 per
cent – higher than other under-25s with lesser qualifications.
The news gets worse. Those companies in the IDS survey which have so
far announced their recruitment plans intend to take only 3413 graduates
this year – 25 per cent below 1991. Even if the other companes take the
same number as they did in 1992, the total will be 20 per cent below the
1991 figure. Employers have also begun to abandon the ‘milk round’, the
series of campus interviews in the spring, when the two sides used to take
their first wary look at each other. Companies such as BP, Merck, NCR,
Girobank and Eagle Star have all announced they will not take part in it
this year. Others are limiting their range – or example, Severn Trent Water
will restrict itself to universities in the Midlands, even though students
there might come from further afield, and have no intention of living in
their university town after graduating.
This tightening of corporate belts means that last summer employers
could have the cream, and are saying last year’s crop was the ‘best-ever’
for quality. ‘We’re turning people down because of sheer numbers,’ says
Dave Rogers, graduate recruitment manager at pharmaceuticals giant SmithKline
Beecham in London. ‘Though things are looking better in research and development:
we’re taking 50 or 60 this year, compared to 30 last year.’ At Logica, Martinus
echoes this: ‘I have had very good comments from our subsidiary managers.
The 1992 intake was very good,’ he says. ‘And there have been an enormous
number of applications.’
But what Rogers has noticed, sitting across a desk from eager applicants,
is that nowadays ‘some are prepared to do almost anything’. One explanation
may be that today’s students face worse financial problems than those in
the past. The student grant has been frozen since the 1990/91 academic year
at £2265 (see Graph), as has the parent income level which confers
eligibility for a full grant. To ‘top up’ the grant, government-financed
loans have been available: each year, a student can apply for an interest-free
five-year advance of up to £660 (increased from £460 in 1990/1).
Consequently, many leave with a degree and a debt.
‘You can’t live on a full student grant,’ says Andrew Petrie, another
St Andrews physics graduate. He finished his four-year course with a £600
overdraft and two loans totalling £900. In its first year, the Student
Loans Company granted loans for an average of £389 each to 180 000
students – 28 per cent of those eligible. In the scheme’s second year, the
average was £532 each, to 261 000 students, or 37 per cent of those
eligible. (The company does not record how many of those already had a loan.)
The figures for this year close in August and will not be released before
October, but there are already 247 000 applications.
Petrie’s first two salary cheques from British Telecom cleared the overdraft;
from April he has to start repaying the loans. ‘It’s no problem as long
as you’ve got a regular income,’ he says. However, not everyone took a loan
out of hardship. Richie took out £400 loans in his third and fourth
years to buy shares in privatised utilities. ‘I made money on them,’ he
says. ‘Though I had to sell some when I joined Coopers & Lybrand.’ The
Student Loans Company makes no stipulation about what loans should be spent
on.
Richie is not typical though. To make ends meet, graduates take ‘McJobs’
– low-skilled, low-paid work in fast-food outlets, for example. Chris, 23,
was awarded a 2:1 in chemistry from the University of Bath: presently he
is unemployed, with £1000 of debts (a £600 overdraft and
£400 student loan) and scratches a living selling items door-to-door
in his home town of Bath, trying to reduce the financial burden looming
over him. The bank began pressing him about the overdraft in January: ‘They
phoned and said they were going to transfer my account from a student to
an ordinary one, and that that would mean a lot of interest charges and
fees on the overdraft.’ He sounds resigned. The selling job brings in about
£30 each week, to add (illegally) to his unemployment benefit. Even
so, he does not want to work as a chemist.
‘It doesn’t interest me,’ he says. ‘I don’t think my intention was ever
to end up solely in chemistry. The area’s too small. I did the degree because
it was something I had always wanted to find out about.’ He didn’t apply
to any companies during the milk round: ‘I was quite clear that I wanted
to take a year off and start this course.’ (He has applied to take a one-year
MA in the history and philosophy of science at Leeds or Manchester, though
the competition for places is ‘quite fierce’.)
To many graduates surveying the bleak domestic outlook, the options
have been simple: go abroad, or into postgraduate research. Linda Tong,
23, tried the first option after she completed her four-year applied biology
course at the University of Bath. She spent six months teaching GCSE-level
biology in Jamaica ‘because I think it’s a good idea not to follow everyone
else, but to look at things from a different perspective’. But on coming
back to Britain just before Christmas, she found the job prospects ‘pretty
depressing: I really notice that there are fewer pages of job adverts, even
in New Scientist.’ She feels in no hurry to get a job, though she has applied
for a few as an advertising copywriter (ironically, writing job ads). ‘I
don’t want to be a laboratory scientist,’ she says. ‘You’re required to
do an awful lot of repetitive, mind-numbing jobs. There’s then the thrilling
bit when the results happen, but I prefer a more dynamic environment.’ She
knows what she’s talking about: during her course she worked on attachment
for six months at Kew Gardens and another six at ICI Agrochemicals.
Yet ICI was among the employers to complain in the IDS survey that ‘as
always’, the vast majority of candidates were not of the required quality.
Was Tong, with a 2:1, just not good enough? ICI never got the chance to
decide; clearly, the work drove her away. If the pay was better in teaching,
she might have gone into that.
Postgraduate work has traditionally been the other option for those
not seeking, or unable to find, commercial work. ‘A vast number of my friends
are doing PhDs because of the job situation,’ says Tong, ‘especially if
they are going to pursue a career in biology.’ (Chemicals and pharmaceuticals
companies tend to prefer chemists or biologists with postgraduate experience.)
One of her friends who got a First went back to a public sector job: ‘I
don’t think she really loves the job, but what else is there? You have
to say in April that yes, you want to spend three years working with, you
know, nematodes or something.’
The IDS survey is equivocal about the long-term usefulness of a PhD.
At many of the companies questioned, someone with a PhD would get between
£1000 and £2000 more on starting than an honours graduate
(though at Ford and ICI there was no difference, while at computer manufacturer
Hewlett Packard there was a £5000 leap). But in the time it would
take to earn the PhD, the graduate would have learned the ropes and might
have overtaken the incoming postgraduate both in salary and business experience.
Nevertheless, the dearth of jobs has persuaded many to stay at university.
‘A lot of people are going for them because there’s nothing else going,’
says Loosemore. ‘They’re saying if there were jobs, they would have gone
for them.’ Petrie recalls one friend who did chemistry and enrolled in a
PhD course: ‘Now he hates it and wants to get off it. He’s trying to get
it turned into a one-year MSc course so he can get out into the real world.
If I was to give people finishing this year advice, I would say don’t give
up trying to get a job, and don’t be railroaded into further education as
a last resort.’
But if scientists and engineers are not going into science, where does
the fault lie? Is it with the companies that cannot make their careers
seem attractive enough? Is it with the graduates, harbouring overblown expectations
built up by media reports of high-flying financiers and moguls while scientists
labour away in back rooms? Or is it in the courses at university?
There is a growing mood among manufacturing companies that the real
flaw is in education. Martin Duffell, head of management recruitment at
Unilever, comments: ‘There’s an enormous culture change when students come
into business because whereas education is all about the idea that collaboration
is bad – if you collaborate with someone else in your final exam, you’ll
get thrown out without a degree – in industry, it is what we want most.’
He notices the difference in graduates who have come from courses which
emphasise teamwork, using individual creativity to enhance a group decision.
Unilever’s head office hires about 85 graduates each year specifically to
become higher managers on a ‘fast track’: they are expected to be able to
persuade and negotiate as well as having skills in technical subjects. About
half the jobs are allocated to scientists and engineers.
‘Final decisions in business are as much dependent on who’s got the
best idea as who can persuade the group that they have,’ he says. A scientist
with good interpersonal skills is assured of a good future career, not just
here, but anywhere.’
However, it is in precisely that area that he, and his opposite numbers
at such manufacturing giants as Esso, Shell, Digital Equipment and IBM,
feel students are let down by their curricula. Duffell is certain that graduates
must be taught the virtues of teamwork from an earlier stage: ‘You only
have to look at Japanese business to see how important teams and groups
are to them.’
The ideal, the managers think, would be for degree courses to incorporate
more of the ‘tutorial’ styles commonly found in arts degrees, in which students
have to argue and justify their work in front of their peers. There is another
problem: workload. ‘Scientists and engineers tend to have very crowded timetables
which don’t leave them much time for extra-curricular activities,’ Duffell
says. ‘But it is often those activities which give them the best chance
to learn the skills that will be useful later. Perversely, it is often only
the brighter students who finish their work quickly enough to take a large
part in outside activities.’
The emphasis on accountancy within British companies is also being challenged.
‘An industry that’s technically successful is likely to throw up a technical
chairman,’ observes Duffell. ‘An industry that’s looking to shrink and cut
costs is probably going to ask a chartered accountant to come in and cut
those costs.’ Unilever has no chartered accountants on its main board. ‘I
would be very alarmed about the company’s future if we packed the board
with such people.’
Clearly, employers really do want science and engineering graduates,
but especially those with those elusive ‘interpersonal skills’. The message
from the graduates – both employed and unemployed – is that they want careers
which will exercise their intellectual abilities, already shown by winning
a degree, from the start. ‘I don’t necessarily want something more creative,
just more varied,’ says Donald, now in Canada. ‘I was just given one area:
design the code and present it to someone higher up in a few months. That
was your task.’
Graduates have probably always been like that – and are unlikely to
change. So the responsibility lies with businesses and the designers of
degree courses. But there isn’t much time. Summer will bring another crop
of graduates. Will they disappoint, and be disappointed with, potential
employers in the same way, leaving more indebted, unemployed young people
and underskilled companies struggling to compete?
*Pay and Progression for Graduates, IDS, 192 St John Street, London
EC1V
