In the United Kingdom (UK) the vast majority of university students specialise and study just one subject at bachelor degree level, commonly known in the UK as a single honours degree. However nearly all British universities will permit students if they wish to study two or even three subjects (UCAS 2016a), so called joint or combined honours degrees, internationally known as a double major. Our study sought to explore whether the study of a joint rather than a single honours degree had an impact on employment outcomes six months after graduation. We found an approximately consistent year-on-year 3% point negative gap nationally in the highly skilled employment rates of joint compared with single honours graduates. Further research will aim to provide higher education institutions with observations and recommendations that may assist them in providing double majors or joint honours degrees that lead to excellent highly skilled graduate employability outcomes, and in closing the current gap between single honours and joint honours graduates.

Joint or combined honours degrees in the UK

The focus of the research was students' perceptions of whether joint honours degrees represented a sound student learning experience and led to good academic and employability outcomes. In this minority mode of study for the United Kingdom, students study two academic subjects, rather than the more usual single subject. The qualitative methodology followed was a thematic analysis of self-administered questionnaire data, collected from joint honours students at four English universities in the United Kingdom. The principal results were that the students experienced difficulties in fitting into the two communities of learning for their respective subjects; in being adequately supported; in disparities in teaching, learning and assessment between their two subjects, and in a high workload. The major conclusion was that although the students perceived their learning experiences to have value by virtue of having studied two subjects, a number of issues stymied their achieving the best learning experience possible.

The motivation for this research was to explore the lived experience of joint honours students, for whom there is little in the literature at present. The objective was to critique primary data collected from the students via a self-administered questionnaire. This phenomenological methodology permitted and unfiltered view of the students' learning experiences to be explored. The research is based on a cross-university student survey, conducted over a period of six months. The online survey, which ran between June 2016 and January 2017, involved self-administered questionnaires designed to collect information on the learning experience of students on joint honours degrees, from four different Universities in England. A key finding of this paper is the need for university administrators to pay particular attention to joint honours degrees in their portfolios in the light of the growing and significant number of students opting to study these degrees and the general tendency amongst universities to focus attention on single honours degrees. Particular areas of concern are highlighted where students on joint honours degrees feel improvements in their educational experience could be made. The future scope of the survey results are discussed in

Purpose In the UK, the majority of university students specialise and study just one subject at bachelor degree level, commonly known in the UK as a single honours degree. However, nearly all British universities will permit students if they wish to study two or even three subjects, so-called joint or combined honours degrees, internationally known as a double major. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether educational advantage, measured by the “Participation of Local Areas” (POLAR) classification, correlated with rates of graduate destinations for joint and single honours graduates. This study focused particularly on Russell Group and Post-92 Universities. Design/methodology/approach The authors analysed the complete data set provided from the Higher Education Statistics Agency Destination of Leavers from the Higher Education survey, and combined this with data from the POLAR4 quintiles, which aggregate geographical regions across the UK based on the proportion of its young people that participate in higher education. The data were analysed to establish whether there was a difference in the highly skilled graduate employability of the joint honours students, focusing particularly on Russell Group and Post-92 Universities, in order to build on previous published work. Findings Single honours and joint honours graduates from higher participation POLAR4 quintiles were more likely to be in a highly skilled destination. However at both the Russell Group and the Post-92 universities, respectively, there was no trend towards a smaller highly skilled destinations gap between the honours types for the higher quintiles. For the highest POLAR4 quintile, the proportion of joint honours graduates was substantially higher at the Russell Group than at Post-92 universities. Furthermore, in any quintile, there were proportionately more joint honours graduates from the Russell Group, compared with single honours graduates, and increasingly so the higher the quintile. Research limitations/implications This study focused on joint honours degrees in the UK where the two or three principal subjects fall into different Joint Academic Coding System (JACS) subject areas, i.e. the two or three subjects are necessarily diverse rather than academically cognate. This excluded the class of joint honours degrees where the principal subjects lie within the same JACS subject area, i.e. they may be closer academically, although still taught by different academic teams. However, the overall proportion of joint honours graduates identified using the classification was in line with the UCAS (2017) data on national rates of combined studies acceptances. Practical implications All Russell Group graduates, irrespective of their POLAR4 quintile, were far more likely to be in a highly skilled destination than single or joint honours graduates of Post-92 universities. Even the lowest quintile graduates of the Russell Group had greater rates of highly skilled destination than the highest quintile from Post-92 universities, for both single and joint honours graduates. This demonstrated the positive impact that graduating from the Russell Group confers on both single and joint honours graduates. Social implications This study could not explain the much smaller gap in the highly skilled destinations between single honours and joint honours graduates found in the Russell Group, compared with the Post-92. Why do a higher proportion of joint honours graduates hail form the upper POLAR4 quintiles, the Russell Group joint honours graduates were more disproportionately from the upper POLAR4 quintiles and the joint honours upper POLAR4 quintiles represented such a larger proportion of the Russell Group overall undergraduate population? Other student characteristics such as tariff on entry, subjects studied, gender, age and ethnicity might all contribute to this finding. Originality/value This study demonstrated that, averaged across all universities in the UK, there was a trend for both single honours and joint honours graduates from higher participation POLAR4 quintiles to be more likely to be in a highly skilled destination, i.e. the more educationally advantaged, were more likely to be in a highly skilled destination, as a proportion of the total from each honours type. This accorded with HESA (2018b) data, but expanded those findings to include direct consideration of joint honours graduates.