Dick Hudson recently emailed the Linguistics in Education list with the following report (re-posted here with his permission):

Hello All. You may be interested in this little report I've just seen:

Lord Baker of Dorking, in a report from the Edge Foundation outlines the need for a radical rethink of the  whole education system in order to address issues of skills mismatch that impact the UK economy. The number of graduates in non-graduate jobs is rising, with an associated negative effect on the wage premiums associated with degrees. This is most acute for people with degrees in creative arts, design, law and linguistics.

In contrast, there is a growing need, and a shortage in supply, for technical and vocational skills in professional and mid-level occupations, across science, engineering, technology, agriculture, manufacturing and processing. Lord Baker’s vision of the future includes significant emphasis on advice and guidance services including the greater involvement of employers in education at all levels, more opportunities for hands-on learning in schools, an emphasis on technical and vocational pathways from 14 including UTCs, apprenticeships and higher apprenticeships, and reinvigorated Level 4 and 5 post-secondary vocational programmes in FE colleges.

Technical and vocational learning should be seen as an option for all, not ‘the other 50%’. Alongside qualifications, Lord Baker sees outcomes for learners in terms of progression into employment or further education as a key measure of success for schools, colleges and universities, with a reduction in the number of learners not in education, employment or training, as an overall aim.

Any idea why linguistics should be in the negative list, or what could be done about it?

In response I did some digging. Here's what I found:

The report referred to seems to be the one available here, called "The Skills Mismatch" and published in March of this year: <http://www.edge.co.uk/media/130721/the_skills_mismatch_march_2014_final.pdf>

The relevant data is in Table 5 on page 18. The table in fact only considers six categories of degree: creative arts & design, law, "linguistics and classics" (!), engineering/technologies, subjects allied to medicine, and medicine and dentistry. The first three of these have fairly high proportions of graduates going into non-graduate jobs (37%, 36% and 34% respectively). For the last three, it's much lower (16%, 13% and <1%).

Setting aside the fact that the numbers in each row don't sum to 100%, there's something distinctly weird about this choice of subjects. Where are history, English literature, and modern languages?

This data itself is taken from Table 6.2 on page 63 of HECSU's 2012 Futuretrack study Stage 4 report: <http://www.hecsu.ac.uk/assets/assets/documents/Futuretrack_Stage_4_Final_report_6th_Nov_2012.pdf> Throughout this report, Linguistics and Classics are treated together. There's some interesting stuff in this monster report, but it's hard to know how much weight to accord any of it given this conflation of two very different subjects. Table 6.2 itself contains many more subjects than the table in Lord Baker's report, and there seems to be no clear rationale for their picking these particular subjects.

There's also an interesting question around what exactly is meant by "non-graduate jobs". The classification in the Futuretrack report seems to be based on this paper by two of the same authors: <http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ier/futuretrack/findings/elias_purcell_soche_final.pdf>. It divides graduate jobs into "Expert", "Strategist" or "Orchestrator", and "Communicator". They actually acknowledge in the paper that "it is not possible to provide a universal definition of what constitutes a graduate job as a general taxonomic category". But then their system describes the following as non-graduate jobs, among others: health care practice managers, electronics technicians, paramedics, dispensing opticians, counsellors, choreographers, financial accounts managers, estate agents, officers of NGOs, care workers, and many more.

In a nutshell, I'd say this is nothing to worry about, except perhaps from a PR perspective.