Some practitioners and others interested in HE participated in a wide ranging discussion based on a series of questions on the current position of careers advisory services in higher education. The discussion raised issues such as:

• how are careers services in HEIs coping with the increased number of students and the widening participation agenda,
• are careers services under pressure to come up with 'good' destination statistics,
• do careers services promote 'their' students over those of another institution or is there a community of careers services?  Is employer sponsorship a 'good thing'?

Topics discussed included:

1)  Tuition fees and the possible need to link financial and career planning:  

• Will students acting as 'consumers' make new sets of demands on HEIs?
• Will fees act as another barrier to participation in learning for some prospective students? 

There is a tension inherent in all guidance practice - should the focus be on working exclusively with individual clients or working with systems? Seems like there are three possibilities. Practitioners could:

• Work with clients to overcome difficulties created by the policy change and/or help them cope with debt, etc.
• Work to change the structures/systems creating the difficulty (e.g. work through professional bodies which could lobby for change);
•  Do both!

If we focus exclusively on work with the individual, we can be criticised for ignoring the realities faced by clients. If we work with systems, we can be criticised for being inappropriately 'political'.

I agree that practitioners should:

• continue to help clients, as well as
• developing strategies to influence policy change.

However, practical issues emerge:

• To what extent, realistically, can guidance workers advise clients (and their parents) on finance? Professional indemnity for guidance workers probably does not extend to cover this area of advice.
• Who else can clients be referred to for financial advice?
• What are the training issues in this area for guidance workers?
• How meaningful is financial advice to the average young adult without previous educational input on this topic?
• How can LMI contribute to the financial advice given: for example, what are the chances of getting a salary that will permit the repayment of loans over a given period?
• As well as lobbying for change, the effects of new policy measures could usefully be brought to the attention to policy makers; guidance workers could be a valuable source of information, if a feedback mechanism were available, to inform policy makers about the real & perceived obstacles that deter clients from entering HE. Currently IAG Partnerships are invited to gather "success stories" (client case studies). Policy makers might actually learn more from some "failure stories"?

2.  Role of higher education careers services in widening participation to HE

• Careers Services in higher education institutions are a diverse box of tricks:
• Some enjoy the luxury of high status, recognition of their role in both the undergraduate experience and in securing positive destinations on graduation;
• Others find themselves under-resourced squashed between the academic equivalent of the rubbish bins and the 'goods out' area of the institution.
• From other parts of the guidance sector, practitioners look wistfully across and imagine a different, better world within higher education careers services. There, the fantasy goes, one-to-one guidance interactions are still valued.
• On the other hand, worn down higher education careers advisers lament the erosion of longer interviews and the increasing emphasis on short sharp shock tactics manifest in a treadmill of quick queries and information giving exercises - both an inevitable response to the increased pressure of more students and proportionately fewer resources. The only outcome valued by the institution is the annual first destination survey (recently renamed to something else I know not what).

3.  Further questions:

• Why have careers services in HEIs become an important performance indicator for some institutions?
• How will careers services in HEIs cope with the increased numbers of students as a result of widening participation?
• If students have to pay for their degrees, will they have different and/or greater expectations of their career services – perhaps to act more as placement offices and less as guidance providers?
• What is the typical ratio of advisers to students in HEIs.
• How significant are Careers Services in influencing the destination of graduates within HEIs?
• To what extent are Careers Services in Higher Education Institutions pressurised to come up with 'good statistics' on destinations, if they are, does this compromise the value of that data?
• Are destinations based on where graduates are 6 months post graduation of any value or not? What is the rationale by which this information is collected and can anyone give the current requirements?
• Careers Services in HE are perceived in some quarters as the last vanguard for those who are committed to giving guidance – is this luxury imagined or real?
• Why should HEIs value and resource their careers services?
• Is there a role for 'bought in' expertise – e.g. for HEIs to subscribe to graduate prospects services rather than keeping it all in-house?
• How can you judge the effectiveness of an HE Careers Service?
• Is there a community of higher education careers services, or do they find themselves in competition with one another – trying to attract the most prestigious employers? (what about mutual aid – a service which seems to be eroding).
• How should we view those services that proactively seek employer sponsorship to subsidise their broader activities? Is this sensible pragmatism in the interests of the student population, or a regretable erosion of impartiality?

4.  Some replies:

• Well to answer the simple one - First Destination Survey (FDS) is being replaced with DLHE - Destination of Leavers from Higher Education Institutions. You can find out more about this new system from the HESA website: the statistics are now produced on a CD-ROM. The new system was negotiated over several years and AGCAS has been involved in this process. The new system is hugely labour intensive.
• What a lot of valuable questions! I will try to have a go:
• Careers services are involved in performance management because they are central to the collation of statistics about students' employment trajectories. However, they have been seen as part of quality management in a much broader sense for a long time (DfES, 2003, Careers Education and Guidance in England: A Nationa Framework ).
• Coping with numbers? - with difficulty I would guess - the increase in student numbers has not been coupled with commensurate increase in resource levels in respect of teaching staff, support staff or guidance professionals. In a little over a decade the university populations have doubled but staffing has not - we probably need to be able to document this more adequately - but I would have a look at the Universities UK website - or one of the teaching unions such as the UCU for more info to begin with.
• I am less sure that paying for the degree will alter this - many students see CAS as placement services anyway! However, there is a burgeoning sense that having to pay for one's degree is likely to lead to increasing sense of being a consumer (rather than a student) with particularly parents (or funding bodies) asking tough questions about what students actually get for their money.
• Don't know.
• Don't know well enough and we should do. There is research in this area that indicates that parents and peers are very influential and that work experiences play a considerable role. An issue for careers advisory services appears to be reaching the (large sometimes) numbers of students who do not use them at all.
• I don't think the stats can be compromised - the use made of the data however is a different matter - and universities will doubtless use good news stories to advantage.
• There is some research about grauates' employment trajectories seven years on after graduation - funded in part by HECSU - by Kate Purcell and Peter Elias (2004).
• Last vanguard of guidance - maybe - but from whose perspective?
• Some do - some don't - you're working with raw prejudice here! - they all should of course!
• You don't have to buy in Graduate Prospects - everyone may have it - so this is not a mutually exclusive matter.
• I think AGCAS probably fulfils this 'community-stimulating' role - I feel there is more cooperation than competition (but I may not be close enough to know) - in some areas cooperation is more evident than others - e.g. Yorkshire - parts of the Midlands and the South West - where CAS have grouped together to jointly undertake projects.
• Now there's the question!
• Should careers services in Higher Education Institutions proactively seek employer sponsorship in order to fund their services for students? I would answer 'yes' on the purely pragmatic basis that most HE career services are so poorly funded that any increase in funds has to be of benefit to students! However I have two main concerns. First, there are real dangers when a client's perception of impartiality are influenced by overt sponsorship etc etc - a well rehearsed argument. Secondly, with the current prevalence of 'targeting' (large employers only seeking graduates from a limited number of, generally prestigious, institutions) sponsorship can polarise even further the services offered by different institutions. A targeted university is in a good bargaining position with considerable opportunities to obtain sponsorship in terms of actual cash, equipment, contribution to workshops, fairs etc, seconded employees, etc. A non-targeted university will struggle to get information and vacancies from employers and will rarely be able to gain any form of sponsorship.

Other responses on employer sponsorship:

It's really hard to come to a definite answer about this. It is true that employer sponsorship is often essential to fund the activities of HE Careers Services. However, I do wonder if pursuit of external funding in a proactive way can be self defeating for a range of reasons:

• It takes the eye of the ball. If HE institutions can be made to see the benefits that their careers services deliver, then perhaps they would be more willing to fund them appropriately. By looking externally for funding, HE providers are let off the hook. It's a bit like the argument around charitable giving in my view. There are some things that should be funded for the collective good, and this being so, it should not be dependent on the whim of those who are in a position to give. Once HECSs become dependent on that source of income, what happens if there is a down-turn and employers no longer queue up to court previously popular institutions?
• There is a contradiction - those employers most able to sponsor events are not representative of the range of opportunities of interest to graduates and this 'skews' the message passed on to undergraduates.
• The disproportionate weighting of the major graduate recruiters at best irritates, and at worst alienates, large numbers of students who have their prejudices confirmed that the careers services is firstly, about getting them a job, and secondly about getting them a job as an accountant. Some resent what they perceive as an apparent apathy among careers services in getting e.g. representatives from NGOs, the Arts or whatever. Its hard to counteract this perception when you are sitting under a banner for a well known chartered accountants, giving out a careers service brochure with a corporate logo emblazened on it.
• If we believe that careers guidance is partly about helping people to identify and achieve their own goals and that is often most useful for those who lack confidence, or have other barriers, then it might be argued that those who most need the support of their careers services are least well catered for. The student who hangs on in there, but obtains a pass degree in philosophy, is frankly unlikely to be the person the main graduate recruiters is interested in - although arguably that individual may have more to gain from the careers services on offer than the graduate with a 2:1 in Law who will probably end up with a clutch of job offers irrespective of any support from the same careers service.
• A great deal of time and resources are used to generate employer interest and sponsorship, the question is, would that time be better spent trying to cater for the less advantaged, less focussed and less motivated graduate, rather than having ever bigger and better career fairs. These may bring prestige to the institution, but do they serve those users most in need of the careers service. (I'm conveniently ignoring the issues around whether these activities generate a profit - personally I'm not convinced they do, because time spent on organising events is not always costed in).
• I also wonder about the ethics of a system which means that the prestigious HE institutions work hard on behalf of 'their students' arguably at the expense of students at other prestigious neighbouring HEIs. This may be advantageous for their own graduates, but it is not in keeping with the idea that careers guidance should be about something more than giving individuals a competitive advantage whilst the vast majority remain losers in an inequitable system. It concerns me that careers services find themselves in competition with those at other institutions, when perhaps a collaborative approach would be more advantageous.

Ultimately lets face it, businesses don't sponsor careers service activities because they laud the values they represent. They want a financial return and that means access to what they perceive to be the most talented (often very narrowly defined) graduates.

So, rather unhelpfully, I don't know! I doubt employer sponsorship will go away, and undoubtedly some students benefit from it, and some institutions careers services absolutely depend on it - but that doesn't mean it should be uncritically accepted.

Are graduates from different higher educational institutions valued differently by employers?

1) You can spot a Sussex or an Oxbridge student at a hundred paces, all universities produce distinctive graduates that reflect the institutional culture and ethos. Recently, talked to a new academic at Sussex (ex Warwick) who brought up this very point. He could not believe how non-vocational the Sussex students were.

I suppose this supports the 'Community Interaction' theories of career development put forward by Law. The power not only of the peer group but of the culture of the educational establishment.  In the case of Sussex, there was a firm belief in the purity of 'learning to learn'.  The university was set up without subject boundaries. Teaching was arranged in groupings that cut across traditional subjects. In a way, this was rather like the modern primary school teaching where you would study a topic and in doing so would do a bit of English, maths, science, drama etc . Lectures were not a major feature - mainly seminar work and library research.

As you can imagine this has sat more and more uncomfortably with the outside world. QAA visits were tough! The increasing emphasis on learning outcomes, credit transfer, together with the requirements of professional bodies (e.g. British Psychological Society) for degrees to cover a 'body of knowledge' for accreditation, have all made this position untenable. So this academic year the whole structure has been changed to a more traditional model. It will be very interesting to see how this will affect the culture and whether a more vocational attitude will start to be developed.

2)  This is a really interesting example.......especially the comparison with Warwick. Having gone through various Quality Assurance visitations in higher education, I would have thought that this process is, inevitably, a powerful mechanism for drawing all universities into 'line'. Except a privileged few who seem to be sufficiently powerful to 'buck the trend'.