Vice chancellor fears scares deter students from further education

Professor Peter Slee, the deputy vice chancellor at Huddersfield University has hit out at claims that students will face a desperate scramble for graduate level jobs after research said there would be up to 70 candidates for every position this summer.

The Association of Graduate Researchers has claimed the majority of employers would not consider applicants with a degree lower than a 2:1 because of the numbers of university leavers on the job market.

It claims the number of applicants for every graduate level job has more than doubled in just two years while the number of vacancies has fallen for the second year running.

However Prof Slee said Huddersfield University did not accept that significant numbers of students would struggle to find graduate level employment and claimed fears over the graduate job market could become damaging for the country and the economy if it led to pupils shunning university.

He said: "It doesn't accord with what we are seeing here. Our graduates are going on into full-time work. Last year we had 92 per cent of graduates going into either full-time work or further training within six months of them graduating.

"We have high graduate employability here but across the sector it is around 89 to 90 per cent and in some areas such as our School of Education it was 100 per cent.

"There are young people at school or college who are thinking of going on to university with a view to getting a professional job who could be put off by this scaremongering."