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Cancelled Job Offers Prompt Recent University Graduates to Enrol on Masters Programmes

by Michael Curzon
3 July 2021 3:28 PM

With many work placements and internships cancelled last year due to lockdown, and a good deal of employers not bothering to get back to failed applicants, thousands of recent university graduates have rushed to study “panic masters” courses. The Observer has the story.

Universities including UCL, Cambridge and Edinburgh, told the Observer they were seeing substantial increases, ranging between 10 and 20%, in the number of U.K. students applying to study for postgraduate degrees in the autumn.

Mary Curnock Cook, an admissions expert who is chairing an independent commission on students, said the rise is due to “a collapse in confidence in the graduate employment market”. There is a backlog of applications from graduates who struggled to secure roles last year or whose placements were cancelled, she said.

“That’s what’s causing this idea of the panic master’s,” she said. “A lot of what I’m hearing is people getting stressed about making tons of applications and not even getting acknowledgement. It’s a stain on employers that they’re not treating their applicants with common courtesy.”

Curnock Cook added that while master’s degrees are usually worthwhile investments since they are favoured by many employers and result in higher average salaries, she advised against “making decisions in a rush for the wrong reasons”, particularly since loans available for postgraduate study does not cover living expenses.

Dan Barcroft, Head of Admissions at Sheffield University, said postgrad study has been especially popular among undergraduates planning to remain at the university, with application numbers rising by 35%. “People are choosing to stay in education at a time of economic turbulence,” he said. …

Last year top graduate employers cut vacancies by nearly a half, although some jobs have been reinstated this year. There are particular shortages of entry-level roles in the industries that have been worst affected by the pandemic, including travel, hospitality and retail.

A recent survey of more than 2,000 students by advice service Prospects showed that over a third of university finalists are changing their career plans due to the pandemic, while two-thirds who are planning postgraduate study are choosing to do so to switch career path.

Nearly half of university students said they felt unprepared for the job market, citing a lack of experience, vacancies and their skills as the main barriers. 

Worth reading in full.

Tags: InternshipsStudentsUniversityWorkWork placements

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16 Comments
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Fingerache Philip
Fingerache Philip
3 years ago

Our 19 year old granddaughter who has been attending dance classes since the age of 3 and received excellent A level grades and was all set to study dance and choreography at university last year has decided not to bother now,with all the uncertainty.
THANK YOU, GOVERNMENT, POLITICIANS, SAGE AND COLLABORATING SHEEP.

Last edited 3 years ago by Fingerache Philip
36
0
Annie
Annie
3 years ago
Reply to  Fingerache Philip

I hope and pray that her opportunity will come.

17
0
Fingerache Philip
Fingerache Philip
3 years ago
Reply to  Annie

Thank you, Annie.
Kind and considerate as always.

7
0
Lucan Grey
Lucan Grey
3 years ago

“Curnock Cook added that while master’s degrees are usually worthwhile investments since they are favoured by many employers”

Funny that. They said that about batchelor’s degrees vs A levels at one point.

Given that there are 3.5 million people without work that want it and only 0.66 million jobs perhaps the problem is that there aren’t enough jobs to go around.

Last edited 3 years ago by Lucan Grey
15
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TreeHugger
TreeHugger
3 years ago
Reply to  Lucan Grey

Meanwhile hospitality is crying out for staff, no degree needed. Perhaps encouraging all school leavers to go to uni was a mistake.

16
0
Noumenon
Noumenon
3 years ago
Reply to  TreeHugger

That’s an artificial situation caused by the current crisis though.

0
0
Annie
Annie
3 years ago
Reply to  Lucan Grey

Yes, Masters degrees are simply the product of degree inflation.

16
0
Hopeless
Hopeless
3 years ago

Seems to me that it’s out of the unemployment and student debt frying pan, and into the masters and more debt fire. Now that the Government and its lackey advisers have well and truly stuffed a lot of young folks, from university age downwards to kindergarten, in the current non-crisis, and probably well into the future, we can expect:-

  • increased friction and intergenerational divides
  • higher unemployment
  • higher taxes for us and future generations to pay for this fiasco
  • a less well-educated country, despite more Masters being about
  • a student debt crisis

and probably a few more unpleasant things.

As with the rest of this, it is a complete disgrace. Where, one wonders, is Two-Brains Lord Willetts, last heard rambling on about how their elders have stolen the future of the young? Not a peep, that I’ve heard, from someone who should stop pontificating and DO something.

12
0
NonCompliant
NonCompliant
3 years ago

Doctor Richard Fleming on all things Covid. Great video. It’s a long one but well worth your time if you’ve not seen it in full.

https://media.livecast365.com/highwire/thehighwire/content/1622927384709.mp4

2
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Julian
Julian
3 years ago

“It’s a stain on employers that they’re not treating their applicants with common courtesy.””

Well maybe, but isn’t the greater stain on the govt for trying to wreck the economy for no good reason?

17
0
thedarkhorse
thedarkhorse
3 years ago

A lot of what I’m hearing is people getting stressed about making tons of applications and not even getting acknowledgement. It’s a stain on employers that they’re not treating their applicants with common courtesy.”
There’s nothing new about that. In 2017 my son graduated in computer science, having earlier failed to acquire a year 2 placement, as did a considerable number of other students in his year-group. He wrote loads of applications and I recall only three responses, two of which led to interviews but didn’t work out. Same with actual job applications after he’d graduated. Despite getting a first (and having a physics degree as well) it took him eight months to finally land a job, and the vast majority of the employers he wrote to either (a) never answered his application or (b) never informed him of his interview result.
Ironically, now he’s settled into a permanent job, he is pursued on his LinkedIn account almost daily by agents with job offers.

9
0
Cecil B
Cecil B
3 years ago

Caption competition

‘Hire me, after eighteen years of education I can tell you if it’s raining or not’

10
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DanClarke
DanClarke
3 years ago

What a racket. Blair started this by telling our young, you don’t want to do that job, go to uni, while importing millions from the EU. Same Blair trashing the country now. When will that man leave us alone.

11
0
SkepticalHomme
SkepticalHomme
3 years ago
Reply to  DanClarke

I remember it well as I was part of the 1998 university intake – the first year that had to pay tuition fees. Felt betrayed at the time. Looking back I got off relatively lightly, graduating with only a 15k debt. Even at the time I couldn’t understand the wholesale of expansion of university membership, and the fact that many people I knew from home went who had no facility to be sitting in academe for three years and should have done apprenticeships instead. I also remember Blunkett – another Bliar – responding to fears about unchecked immigration in the late 90s by airily responding (although, in fairness the man is anything but ‘airy’) “Britain has always been a crowded, vigorous Isle!” Yeah, right. What do we have to show for these ‘golden’ New Labour years. Well the legacy is pretty toxic – widespread expansion of PFI, start of the deification of ‘our nhs’, the ruination of our higher education system with the focus on profit over excellence, expansion of the police/surveillance state, consolidation of welfare, and a disastrously overcrowded country increasingly full of people who – many on religious grounds – despise the state that doles out their handouts. To paraphrase another politician, one has the feeling that you could kick down the door to today’s U.K. and the whole rotten edifice would fall in. And yet, somehow this state and government is legitimate rather than rogue – and the Blairite model is the one it follows.

6
0
clem
clem
3 years ago

So we are going to have a load of people having been through 20+ years of academic neo-marxist ideology, potentially never having had a real job or experience outside of education, leaving uni in their mid twenty’s to face the real world for the first time.

I’m sure many will get jobs being managed by the person who left school at 16 and started at the lowest levels and worked their way up, with little or no debt to their name.

9
0
SkepticalHomme
SkepticalHomme
3 years ago
Reply to  clem

Or perhaps we’ll all have been sent to bucolic re-education camps in Hemel Hempstead and Sister No.1 Rayner will head up the ruling idiocracy?

1
0

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