This was the amazing claim made at the latest TARGETjobs Breakfast News in front of over 200 graduate recruiters at Quaglino’s yesterday morning. Three distinguished speakers addressed the issue as it affects graduate recruitment and all came to the same conclusions. The new CEO of the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR), Stephen Isherwood, began by revealing results from a recent AGR survey of employers that showed that social mobility was getting worse – despite the high profile that this issue enjoys.
Polly Toynbee, the award-winning Guardian journalist and campaigner, said that the only way to improve social mobility is to put resources into early years, as this was the time when a child’s future was decided. According to Polly, we are now in a period of hour glass recruitment that feeds the self-perpetuating class divide.
Simon Howard, from Work Group, said that policy makers don’t really understand the issues, as they have no personal experience of living on a low income; issues which are perpetuated by graduate recruiters using the 2.1 bar and UCAS points as selection criteria. He suggested that recruiters could drop these benchmarks but this would mean they wouldn’t have easy access to the elite. While this practice continues, students who study outside of the top 30 universities shouldn’t be led to believe that they will definitely get a graduate job, because many won’t. We are doing them a disservice by misleading them into spending £30,000 on a university degree which most likely won’t get them a job that will repay their debt. Simon said it is time we revamped apprenticeships and internships as cost-effective stepping stone into top careers.