Pro Bono Economics has calculated benchmarks for obtaining skilled employment against which to assess the effectiveness of upReach’s programmes of employability support. upReach works with students from less advantaged backgrounds (or “Associates”) to help them access and sustain highly-skilled employment after graduation.
upReach supports undergraduates from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to secure top graduate jobs. They offer free, personalised programmes of support, which are carefully designed to help students understand career pathways and develop the skills, networks and experiences needed for career success.
This study has reviewed publicly available information from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, the Department for Education, and the Office for Students regarding student outcomes to identify appropriate benchmarks to compare against outcomes for participants in upReach’s programmes.
We focus on employment and wage outcomes and find that:
However, it is important to note that we cannot draw conclusions about causality on the basis of this analysis: while we observe that employment outcomes appear to be more positive for upReach associates than for graduates in general, we cannot attribute the cause of this difference to participation in an upReach programme.
Access to more granular data on outcomes, with the ability to cut graduate outcomes across multiple graduate characteristics and/or outcomes at once (gender, POLAR4 quintile, university, course studied, employment outcome, salary, skill level of job, etc) would significantly improve the scope for analysis of the sector’s outcomes.
Thank you to Bank of America for their support on this project.