Category: LEO

Perhaps we have LEO all wrong?

In the week of the industrial strategy, which brought confirmation as to how central higher level skills will be to our plans for national growth, the annual release of longitudinal education outcomes (LEO) data) hits a bit different.

In the past, ministers and higher education obsessives, have seen the release as a chance to rank universities and subjects – and perhaps even a chance to spot the infamous “low quality courses” – based on median graduate earnings. As we’ve been through time and time again on Wonkhe, this doesn’t really work.

But quietly, and at the instigation of the former Unit for Future Skills which now forms a part of Skills England, earnings have taken something of a back seat to more detailed information about subject areas, place, and industrial sectors. If you wanted to understand the way in which investment in particular subjects might translate to benefits to particular industries (to support changes to the allocation of the Office for Students Strategic Priorities Grant, for example), LEO is where you would look.

Factory model

And you can illustrate this with today’s release of LEO data on graduate outcomes and provider level data. (There’s even a new DfE dashboard.)

Let’s take a worked example. Advanced manufacturing is one of the eight sectors named in the industrial strategy as a national priority. As a sector it is going to be receiving £4.3bn over the next five years, including £2.8bn in research and development, from the state. Of the “frontier industries” within the manufacturing sector battery technology and advanced materials feel like clear priorities – and exactly the kind of things that might need the higher level skills that a university education might bring – although manufacturing as a whole will be in a similar position.

How do you develop these skill sets?

First up, we can see what graduates that work in manufacturing industries have studied. Engineering is the main route (and the route to the kind of high earnings that suggest senior roles) – just over 1,900 people with a first degree in engineering are working in the sector.

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But it is clear that manufacturing also needs business expertise (there are 1,350 business graduates in the field) and design capability (890 creative arts and design graduates). Both these groups earn rather less than the engineers – the low level of pay for creative arts graduates suggests that these workers may have recently moved into the sector or are in non-graduate roles, or (whisper it) we might need to pay them better. This latter interpretation is backed up by the fact that similar proportions of graduates are in this sector a year after graduation, and designers are consistently paid less.

There is a regional component to this too (using the purple filters at the bottom of the chart, note that you can only use one of these at once) as we can see that when we look at London we can see that salary differentials shrink between our top three.

In terms of specific manufacturing specialisms giving design graduates good jobs ten years on, another plot of the same data suggests automotive, and aircraft/space craft, manufacturing are particularly positive destinations. That said, they are not the primary destinations for creative arts and design graduates ten years out: as with many subject areas teaching is well represented, as are retail and advertising.

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The regional dimension

Let’s say that we also want to use state investment in skills for manufacturing to have a regional benefit – and we wanted to focus on manufacturing in the north east. Would we need to specifically grow design provision in the north east of England in order to provide design graduates for firms there?

Based on the data, the answer is yes. Most design graduates who studied in the north east working in manufacturing, are working in the north east ten years on. Though the numbers are small, the same appears to be true at other career points.

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Do we know if design students (rather than creative arts students) are the ones working in manufacturing? We don’t for certain but we can be reasonably sure. There are more design students than any other subjects in the creative arts and design area – and they tend to earn more ten years on than their peers in the arts. The median salaries also seem to match up – designers aren’t big earners, but they do earn more than some more traditional “skills priority” areas like ecology and mineral technology.

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Picking winners

Seasoned LEO-watchers will be aware that there are issues when you look at specific sub-groups within the data. One of the drawbacks here is that we can’t track design specifically by provider – it would be helpful, if we decide we need more product designers in the north east, we knew which existing provider was landing them that well paid senior roles later in their careers. Best we can tell (and only five years out) it might be Newcastle and Northumbria – but we also need to factor in more granular effects (is Newcastle more likely to offer higher-paid design jobs than Sunderland or Middlesborough – I’d expect so, but we don’t get that data).

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It’s also likely that Teesside and Sunderland will be recruiting students with less traditional backgrounds, and we know that will have an impact on careers and salaries – but interestingly it appears to be Northumbria that are getting the best results for students from a domicile in a POLAR4 quintile one area.

So there we have it: if we want to invest in advanced manufacturing in the north east of England in a way that gets the best results for local people, we need to support the design courses at Northumbria University. Which is something of a shame as we cut state support for design provision a couple of years ago.