New British Academy policy toolkit: Understanding SHAPE Graduates

The British Academy has recently launched a new data-rich policy resource, the Understanding SHAPE Graduates toolkit.

The toolkit aims to shine a light on SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts for People and the Economy) graduates’ contributions to the UK economy and society and to help increase understanding of their career trajectories. It consists of an interactive data dashboard, a series of ‘key findings’ drawn from the data, and a policy briefing contextualising how graduate outcomes are understood and measured by policymakers.

Why now?

The Academy regularly makes the case for the positive impact SHAPE graduates make to the economy and wider society, using crucial skills like critical thinking and creativity to tackle some of society’s biggest contemporary challenges.

However, debates about the value of degrees both to individual graduates and to the country as a whole too often miss out these aspects, particularly in a constrained fiscal context.

What’s new?

Understanding SHAPE Graduates updates and expands on findings from the Academy’s previous quantitative report, Qualified for the Future (2020). Based on analysis of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and Longitudinal Educational Outcomes (LEO) datasets, the toolkit presents new data from the Covid-19 and cost-of-living crisis period – all available for users to explore through our fully interactive dashboard, part of the Academy’s SHAPE Observatory.

We hope the toolkit will be a valuable resource for anyone advocating for the SHAPE disciplines, at a time when subjects across the humanities and social sciences are feeling the pressure of the current financial crisis in higher education.

Here are just some of the key areas we cover in our data analysis:

Employment

Crucially, we show that SHAPE graduates have almost identical employment rates to their STEM counterparts: 87% of SHAPE graduates were employed in 2023, compared to 88% of STEM graduates, and 79% of non-graduates at the next highest qualification level. This challenges the common misconception that SHAPE graduates have poor prospects in the labour market.

Earnings

SHAPE graduates earned on average £21 per hour in 2023, compared to £16 per hour for non-graduates at the next highest qualification level. While STEM graduates do earn higher average salaries overall, SHAPE graduates experience a higher rate of salary growth: an increase of 43% from one year, to five years after graduation.

Sector

SHAPE graduates are found working in sectors right across the UK economy, with Professional, scientific and technical activities (which includes professional services such as accountancy and law) the most common sector of employment for SHAPE graduates. We found that 78% of the graduate workforce in the Education sector had studied SHAPE, as well as 64% in public administration. 

Region

SHAPE graduates can be found powering the economy of regions and nations across the UK. While London stands out as a hub for SHAPE graduates, with 71% of the capital’s graduates holding a SHAPE degree, SHAPE graduates make up over 50% of the graduate workforce in all the UK’s devolved nations and regions.

Data limitations

While we are delighted to have been able to bring all this data together for stakeholders and subject advocates to use, we also acknowledge the limitations of current graduate data (which we delve into in more detail in the toolkit’s policy context briefing).

This includes longstanding concerns with both the LFS and LEO datasets, incorporating issues with survey response rates, in the case of LFS, and the shortcomings of LEO data when it comes to representing the earnings of those working part-time and/or freelance.

Also, at this stage our data is from SHAPE and STEM aggregated groups only, rather than individual subjects. We focus on aggregated graduate data to mitigate some of the data limitations described above, including small sample sizes, as well as to present a broad overview of graduate outcomes, rather than to assess the strength or weaknesses of comparative outcomes for individual subjects.

Perhaps most significantly, current graduate data presents too narrow a picture, with an inevitable focus on earnings and employment. We know that SHAPE graduates have a considerable non-financial impact, on culture, on civic life and society more broadly, but this is largely absent from existing data.

Let’s talk!

We hope that the wider SHAPE community finds Understanding SHAPE Graduates a useful tool, that helps us communicate the value of our disciplines and celebrate the great things our graduates do. We are eager to hear feedback and suggestions from users about how we could improve the toolkit, so please get in touch. Our intention is that Understanding SHAPE Graduates will be the start of a wider conversation, where together we can share ideas for how we can better capture the holistic value of our graduates. Please join us in this conversation!

Alfie Denness, Higher Education & Research Policy Adviser, The British Academy