GRADUATES with modest degrees in irrelevant subjects from undistinguished universities can look forward to little more than poorly-paid clerical jobs, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said yesterday.
It found mounting concern among employers about the quality of graduates emerging from a higher education system that has doubled in size over the past 10 years, three-quarters of the increase being accounted for by new universities that were formerly polytechnics and colleges.
Almost half the graduates recruited recently by banks and building societies - regarded as typical of the service sector - were being paid £8,000 a year to do "sub-graduate " jobs involving routine tasks traditionally assigned to school-leavers.
"Nearly all managers reported encountering large numbers of graduate job-applicants who apparently lack both technical expertise of any kind and the desired personal qualities," the institute said.
It quoted one manager as saying that routine jobs requiring little training were "very suitable for a 2.2 [from a new university] who has only ever worked part-time in Sainsbury's".
Managers of small and medium-sized firms preferred to recruit graduates with degrees in computing, languages and business or marketing, the institute said.
Larger companies in the service sector were prepared to employ graduates who had studied non-vocational subjects but required them to show maturity and business awareness and to have communication and team-working skills. In the steel industry, however, employers were interested only in graduates with some vocational element in their degrees, such as engineering or technology. They particularly favoured those who had done "sandwich" courses involving work placements.
The institute suggested that the Government should spend less on funding full-time degree courses and more on part-time vocational education.
"The developing problems of 'quality control' in higher education and of growing under-utilisation of graduates in industry provide support for the proposition that limited educational resources should be more evenly shared," it said.
