When I first met my final year option class this session, back in late September, I asked them if any of them had a job or postgraduate course already lined up. Only one of them had. She turned out to be the one student who had secured a work placemennt for herself the previous year and was now on the degree 'with employment experience'.
There is a steady stream of news stories from other unviersities about the proportion of their programmes that incude a work placement, or the proportion of their students who gain such experience (the two are not the same thing). Earlier this week I had lunch with the Vice-President of a major industrial company who said that a high proportion of their graduate positions go to those who have already undertaken work placements with them.
Today we saw the results of the annual Times Higher Education Student Experience Survey. I am delighted that Sheffield is in third place (although a little disappointed that we are not top, of course). We follow East Anglia and Oxford in the overall rankings. We are top for the Students Union and also in the top five on a wide variety of indicators - including the quality of our teaching, the support services, and the library, to name just a few. But one measure where we fall short is in students' perceptions of our connections with 'industry', which I take to mean the connections with employment and the wider world of potential work opportunities. This doesn't necessarily mean work opportunities - it can also mean the connections established through those who use our graduates' skills appearing in courses and interacting with students.
Of course, there are many programmes where there is an intimate connection with employment - Medicine, for example. But there is a wider message here for Sheffield. We owe it to our stduents to enhance the ways in which their time studying with us is influenced by considerations relating to potential careers beyond graduation. There are many ways we could do that, and in some departments we are already doing it well. But we could do more.
Last week I received the regular alumni magazine from the unviersity at which I studied. There was the usual leaflet asking me to update my personal details. But one of the key questions there was asking whether I could offer a work placement to any current student. On another line of thought, I wonder how many departments get recent graduates back 4-5 years after graduation and ask their opinions on curriculum change and the course offer to create programmes that help students to develop the confidence and skills to be successful in employment.
I am setting up a significant project over the next few months to seek to redress that relatively low score on industry connections in the THE survey, and to increase the placement opportunities for our students.
But before anyone comments that I seem to be taking a very instrumentalist view of what higher education is about, let me say that I also want to increase the intellectual breadth of our programme offer to expand stduents' minds. Perhaps I'll blog about that sometime in the near future.
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