Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

LightNews

Charlie Ball

@lmicharlie.bsky.social

310 followers 120 following 840 posts

Jisc's Head of Labour Market Intelligence, based in Manchester. Specialist on the labour market for post-18 learners in the UK, posts about work, study, regional labour markets, county cricket. Find my work (mostly) at https://luminate.prospects.ac.uk/

luminate.prospects.ac.uk

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

No lifetime earnings figures are reliable.

I'm of the view, tbh, that they're essentially unknowable. I don't think it's possible to calculate returns to a qualification in any way other than with hindsight and you have to trust your judgement.

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

If the answers to any of those questions are 'lifetime earnings peak earlier than we thought' or 'they leave the labour market some time before state pension age', then almost all of that wage advantage disappears (if you're lucky).

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

One of the biggest is this: yes, skilled trades workers can earn a lot (although it's in part by working longer hours), but for how long? When do their lifetime earnings peak? When do they leave the labour market? Can you continue laying bricks or plastering when you're 67?

We don't know.

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

(and there are even more problems estimating earnings where self-employment and freelancing are common, eg some trades, the arts, IT, some finance etc)

If you find that some of the basic assumptions of the model used to impute earnings don't hold, all the data becomes unreliable.

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

That's for a bunch of reasons but the simplest is: we have no real idea about mid to late career paths in the modern labour market, especially post-COVID (you're citing pre-COVID work), when a lot of over 50s left the labour market on health grounds.

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

The second, more serious mistake, and the more difficult one to explain, is the way you've hung so much of your thesis on lifetime graduate returns.

We don't really have lifetime earnings data for anyone in the labour market. The IFS did their best but had to impute most of it.

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

Ultimately this part of your thesis fails by simply asking the question

"If employers don't need graduates, why do we have a NEET epidemic amongst non-graduates?"

The answer is, employers do need and value graduates.

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

Secondly: that basically means declaring all associate professionals in SOC 3 and most managers in SOC 1 as non-graduate jobs.

This is the pre-Robbins view which was roundly countered in the 60s.

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

Sorry, 16.6 and 17.3, there have been some revisions.

Your argument is that 7 million - 40 per cent - of those graduates (many of whom don't have first degrees anyway as they're HND and the like) didn't need to go to university.
Firstly, employers disagree.

Secondly, in practical terms

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

"So the figure of 20% can be considered to be a lower bound of the over-supply of university places, with a figure of 30% - 40% being a more likely estimate"

The last APS shows that 16.8 million people (ish) in the UK workforce have RQF4+. 17.5 million people (ish) are in SOCs 1 to 3.

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

I work a lot with engineering where we don't have enough graduates. The response of firms when faced with not enough graduates is not to recruit non-graduates for roles where they think they need graduates. It's not to recruit at all.

You may have written a thesis to massively increase NEETs.

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

"This is rational for the employers, and rational for those individuals to go to university, but overall the system is worse than one where fewer people go"

The explanation only works if you assume that if employers no longer have graduate available, they'll recruit other people. Not sure.

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

"We can see this happening in the way many jobs that used to not require degrees now do"

They do that because the jobs change over time.

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

"The ‘signalling’ effect means that even if a degree isn’t needed for a job - in fact, even if it imparted no skills at all - an employer can use it as a selection tool"

Graduates are more expensive than non-grads to recruit and retain. Employers recruit them because they think they need them.

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

The second is to do the researcher trick of redefining a 'graduate job' but leaving a whole load of occupations, usually in SOC 3, as 'non-graduate'. The last time I saw this, it declared everyone in the marketing and PR industry as in non-graduate jobs. This is because of the next fallacy

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

The first is to make the OECD mistake of counting all post-18 qualifications as HE, and so declaring that people with RQF4+ qualifications are 'graduates' and that therefore someone who went to FE and did an HND in hairdressing and became a hairdresser is in a non-graduate job.

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 23d

Some interesting points in this piece, but unfortunately there are too many basic errors in it.

Let's start with the easiest and most basic.

"a third of graduates are in non-graduate jobs"

We don't have a definition of a non-graduate job, firstly. There are only two ways to get at this figure

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 26d

I don't think enough people tell you, but my word Jen, you're good.

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 26d

The strategy was that bad, I had to check we hadn't just appointed Morgan McSweeney

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 26d

Keogh's gonna get ya

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 26d

stupid game anyway

come on you steelbacks!

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 26d

lEt'S rETiRe BaLDErSon OuT iT is A GenIuS IdEA

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · 27d

Look at you with your outstanding young prospects and your impending promotion, spare a thought for those less fortunate than yourselves at Old Trafford.

Reposted by Charlie Ball

Chris Parr @chrisjparr.bsky.social · Sep 9

Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills, showing that the UK is bottom when it comes to the share of expenditure on HE coming from government sources.

Charlie Ball @lmicharlie.bsky.social · Sep 8

Yes, I do see that going on, and as I am very old, like a lot of other people have said, this looks and smells very like the dot. com bubble - useful tech (I use it for other stuff, but timesaving rather than transformational) but currently overvalued.