Hard Lessons for Lifelong Learners? Age and Experience in the Graduate Labour Market

Abstract

The expansion of the higher education system and widening access to undergraduate study has led to growing diversity within the graduate labour supply, including increasing numbers who studied for their degrees as mature students. Analysis of graduates entering the labour market prior to the major expansion in the early 1990s indicated that those over the age of 30 had considerably more difficulty than younger graduates in accessing the career opportunities for which their education had equipped them. Is this still the case for more recent graduates? Drawing on a major qualitative and quantitative study of a class of graduates who completed their undergraduate degree courses in 1995, this paper explores early career development and employment outcomes according to age at graduation. Although we find considerable diversity among all age groups, mature graduates were more likely than their younger peers to experience difficulty in accessing appropriate employment, had a lower rate of earnings growth and expressed higher levels of dissatisfaction with their jobs.

Lang vej at gå – social baggrund og studerendes alder på danske universiteter

“…En raekke undersøgelser -isaer fra Storbritannien -har, tilskyndet af en stadig stigende andel "modne studerende" ved de britiske universiteter, kortlagt sammenhaengen mellem social baggrund og de studerendes alder (Egerton & Halsey 1993, Trueman & Hartley 1996, Egerton 2000a, 2000b, 2001b, Reay 2002, Purcell, Wilton & Elias 2007.…”

The effect of lifelong learning on men’s wages

“…For example, Holmlund et al (2008) report that in 2002 just over forty percent of Swedish university entrants had completed secondary school more than …ve years earlier, while only about one third progressed to university within one year of completing secondary school. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, about thirty percent of both men and women with a degree-level quali…cation by age twenty-nine acquired it after having had a break from full-time education (Purcell et al 2007). In 1994, thirty-one percent of new undergraduates were aged twenty-…ve or over; by 2007 this proportion had risen to forty-three percent (Higher Education Statistics Agency 1995, Higher Education Statistics Agency 2008.…”

Lifelong career mobility and change options in knowledge occupations: career pathway implications of initial degree choices

“…Further, disjunctive change becomes more difficult and less likely at various ages, because of age-specific factors such as lost income, lower salaries, time to recoup the cost, life-stage responsibilities, and ageism in some professional groups, such as law (Sarason, 1977) and the private finance sector (Egerton, 2001;Purcell et al, 2007).…”

“…The boundaryless model of career has been criticised on several aspects in relation to contemporary careers: increased mobility between employers is not supported by empirical evidence (Rodrigues & Guest, 2010); job tenure tends to be stable in Europe, Japan and the USA (Borghans & Golsteyn, 2012); careers have multiple, limiting, boundaries, and boundaries define occupations (King et al, 2005); the models lack accuracy (Inkson, 2006); too much emphasis is placed on the power of individual agency (Okay-Somerville & Scholarios, 2014), neglecting contextual and economic constraints (Inkson et al, 2012); and career development behaviour varies with demographics, context, industry, culture, legislature, the labour market and the economic situation (Leach, 2015;Mayrhofer, 2012;Okay-Somerville & Scholarios, 2014;Purcell et al, 2007;Wilton, 2011;Zacher, 2014). These criticisms broadly focus on some empirical evidence, cultural differences, vagueness /inconsistency, and a tendency by proponents to ignore possible negative outcomes associated with boundaryless model.…”

“…There are indications that the move to higher workforce concentrations of knowledge workers has been evolving in the last three decades in developed economies (Baldwin & Beckstead, 2003) with current trends in the UK (Purcell, Wilton, & Elias, 2007) and Australia towards an era of mass tertiary education, with over 50% of Australian school leavers choosing university study (Finkel, 2016). Simultaneously, however, there is growing evidence of over qualification, underutilisation of graduates' skills, increasing employment of graduates in non-graduate occupations, and lowered financial returns for graduates on their investment in university qualifications (Green & Zhu, 2010;O'Leary & Sloane, 2016).…”