Not just the usual suspects in employability ranking

QS has delivered its fourth consecutive edition of the QS Graduate Employability Rankings 2020, in which it assesses 758 institutions – 15% more compared to last year’s edition.

This ranking aims to ascertain which are the best institutions at engaging with employers. The QS Graduate Employability Rankings 2020 results are relatively stable and this bodes well for both QS and institutions that submit data on an annual basis.

Specialised rankings like this one allow a degree of differentiation compared to global rankings. They enable institutions with different missions to shine (for instance, those that are more aligned with industry needs).

Consider, the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid ranks 435th in the QS World University Rankings and is ranked 79th in the QS Graduate Employability Rankings.

Further, institutions such as Universidad de Navarra, RMIT University, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Waseda University, which rank in the 201-250 band in the QS World University Rankings, rank in the world’s top 100 in the QS Graduate Employability Rankings.

Employability is a contested concept

To put it in context, graduate employability is a contested concept and is often expressed as a labour market outcome that can be easily explained. Increasingly decision-makers see graduate outcomes as a proxy measure of the value of a university education.

This discourse is augmented by the changing dynamics of the labour market (and an emphasis on skills-focused curricula), the massification of higher education and a shift of the cost burden for education from the public purse to students directly.

Graduate employability is also seen as a defining feature of the relationship between higher education and the global economy and it has become a key marketing tool for universities looking to boost enrolment.

And because of the increased marketisation of higher education, there is a race to improve the prospects of employability of students as that will enable universities to make claims about how well institutions are doing in this space.

Top 50 institutions

Universities from six different countries make up the top 10. In descending order these are: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Sydney, Harvard University, Tsinghua University, the University of Melbourne, the University of Cambridge, the University of Hong Kong and the University of Oxford.

The surprise is the absence of the University of California, Berkeley, which opted out, and which featured eighth last year. Instead, the University of Hong Kong moved up from 13th to ninth place, driven chiefly by higher scores from the alumni outcomes measure.

Universities from 16 countries are included in the top 50; of which 22 come from the United States and Canada; 11 from Western Europe and 10 from East Asia. The number of countries represented in the top 100 increases to 23; then doubles to 50 once institutions included in the top 300 are counted.

Overall, institutions from 73 countries are included in the top 500. This wide representation of countries not only highlights the changing patterns of the labour market (and the outlook for new graduates) but also the countries and regions where economic activity is occurring and where the opportunities may lie for student and graduate mobility.

New entrants to the top 50 are Johns Hopkins University, the University of Edinburgh and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Movement in positions

We see that 40 of the institutions ranked in the top 50 moved direction five or less places compared to last year’s standing; of the institutions ranked in the 51-100 band, 24 moved either direction five or less places compared to last year.

Overall 91 institutions which rank in the world’s top 200 remained either unchanged or within five places compared to their standing in last year’s ranking. This is a solid result for a ranking in which institutions can elect to opt out. This is also a ranking in which the number of participants continues to increase year-on-year.

Four institutions which were not included in last year’s edition feature this year and these are: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (131-140); Universidad de Chile (141-150), which coincidentally ranks 30th globally in the employer reputation dimension; University of Kansas (151-160) and the University of Western Australia (151-160).

In the 201-300 band, there are seven new entrants and these come from seven different countries.

Their individual strengths are on a variety of indicators: Universidad Pontificia Comillas ranks seventh globally on graduate employment rate and is 172nd on alumni outcomes; Birla Institute of Technology and Science ranks 72nd globally on employer-student connections; Universidad Interamericana de Panamá ranks 58th globally on alumni outcomes; Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) ranks 10th globally on graduate employment rate; University of Ljubljana ranks 72nd on alumni outcomes; University of South Florida ranks 11th on partnership with employers, and the University of Southern Denmark ranks 91st on partnership with employers.

Untangling the methodology

Contrary to what many people say, this ranking is not about which universities produce the best graduates. As QS says, it is about identifying which are the best institutions at engaging with employers.

This ranking seeks to compare the employability outcomes of institutions by considering five broad categories. The first is the perceived reputation of an institution among employers, which is drawn from the QS Employer Reputation Survey and is based on over 44,000 responses globally. It accounts for 30% of the overall score.

Then QS assesses alumni outcomes (worth 25% of the overall score) by identifying graduates who are high achievers and data is drawn from over 150 lists which measure desirable outcomes in a particular walk of life. QS says it has analysed more than 40,000 of the world’s most innovative, creative, wealthy, entrepreneurial and-or philanthropic individuals to establish which universities are producing world-changing graduates.

The third indicator, partnership with employers (25% of the overall score), comprises two parts. First, it uses Elsevier’s Scopus database to establish which universities are collaborating successfully with global companies (that is, those listed by Fortune and Forbes). Second, it considers work placement-related partnerships that are reported by institutions.

The fourth indicator is employer-student connections (which accounts for 10% of the overall score). This involves counting the number of distinct employers that are actively present on a university’s campus, providing motivated students with an opportunity to network and acquire information in a recent 12-month period.

The graduate employment rate is the last indicator and accounts for 10% of the overall score. It involves measuring the proportion of graduates (and excludes those who are in further study or unavailable to work) in full- or part-time employment within 12 months of graduation.

The construction of this ranking enables universities to shine on different indicators. Consider the breakdown in the top 100 in three indicators: Institutions from 24 countries are included in the employer reputation indicator, institutions from 34 different countries are included in the alumni outcomes, and institutions from 18 different countries are included in the partnership with employers.

In addition, we should consider how universities stand out on different indicators through a geopolitical lens. The nine African universities included in the ranking rank in the top 200 on alumni outcomes. Out of the 17 Scandinavian universities included in the ranking,10 are ranked in the top 200 on partnership with employers. Forty-six (out of the 69 ranked) institutions from East Asia are ranked in the top 200 on employer student partnerships.

Leading countries

The top three English-speaking countries in terms of attracting the highest volume of international students (the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia) combined have 109 universities in the top 300; these are followed by China and Japan with 15 each in the top 300.

Among European countries, Spain has 14 institutions in the top 300, followed by Germany and Italy with 11 each. This is a reflection of the technical and vocational orientation of many of those top-ranked institutions.

Also, it is not surprising that countries with liberalised economies shine in this ranking, for instance, 37 institutions from South Korea, Colombia, Malaysia and Chile feature in the world’s top 500.

From Africa, there are nine universities included in the top 500. The University of Cape Town is the highest ranked at 91st place and is followed by the University of the Witwatersrand in the 181-190 band and the American University in Cairo in the 191-200 band. In every case, their employability ranking is considerably higher than their overall ranking in the QS World University Rankings.

India has 10 institutions included in the top 500, of which four are ranked in the top 200: The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the University of Delhi. Their strength resides in the employer reputation category and is enhanced on the alumni outcomes.

While university leaders and decision-makers are keen to highlight the successes of their universities and national systems, it is important to put into perspective that there are more than 150 million migrant workers globally, with varying degrees of skills, abilities and competencies.

We also see that increasingly there is a higher proportion of the overall global population with tertiary qualifications – for example, there were more than 48 million new graduates globally in 2016. We also see that graduates are working in a variety of industry sectors and increasingly moving between sectors and occupational levels. We also see that potentially there are tens of millions of adults who have plans to move permanently to another country.

As a result, there is a need to invest in skills development and facilitate mutual recognition of skills, qualifications and competences. These are some areas where action is needed. Decision-makers across the globe need to consider these forces of change in setting their policy agenda.

This is a ranking that invites the reader to look beyond the vagaries of the numbers; this is a ranking which in the context of the global forces of change we are facing is a valuable tool to shape social and labour market policy.

Angel Calderon is principal advisor, planning and research, at RMIT University in Australia. He is a rankings expert and a Latin American specialist, and serves on the board of QS World University Rankings.