The proportion of UK graduates who found work straight out of university is 30 per cent lower among those born in the late 1980s compared with those born a decade earlier, according to a new study.
Researchers from UCL and the University of Liverpool found that graduates are experiencing increasingly turbulent starts to their working lives, characterised by periods of part-time or self-employment, as well as unemployment.
They examined data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study and the British Household Panel Survey on 1,860 people in three birth cohorts – those born in 1974-79, 1980-84 and 1985-90, over the 10 years after they left school.
As well as identifying a general shift towards precarity and “patchwork careers”, the researchers found that women, students from poorer backgrounds, and people living outside London and the south-east England were more likely to experience periods of economic inactivity after leaving education.
