When politicians claim that the UK’s universities are failing to prepare students for careers in the real world, Prof Max Lu, vice-chancellor of the University of Surrey, laughs.
“It’s just not true. You only have to look at the data,” says Lu, who has led Surrey since 2016.
“I think it’s quite biased, and based on a few anecdotes they have heard, I don’t think it represents the sector. I think most universities take graduate outcomes very seriously, as a high priority.”
Few could claim that Surrey was failing to set its students on a career path. The university punches above its weight in the Department for Education’s graduate outcomes data, which rates Surrey graduates as among the most employable.
Surrey is one of a group of modern universities with similar histories, such as Lancaster and Bath, that have risen up the Guardian’s ranking above many of those in the elite Russell Group by achieving outstanding results for their graduates’ careers.
Strong graduate outcomes have helped Surrey power its way back into the Guardian University Guide’s top 20 this year, with its strengths seen especially in music, languages and linguistics courses.
Surrey’s overall ranking of 19th is its best performance for several years. In the 2010s the university – based in Guildford – rose to fourth place before a decline four years ago, weighed down by surveys showing its students were increasingly unhappy.
According to Lu, Surrey expanded too rapidly. “The university had decided to increase the volume [of students] because there was huge demand, but the facilities and accommodation were not adequate, so students in the third year suffered quite a lot,” says Lu, a chemical engineer who was previously the provost of Australia’s University of Queensland.
The solutions included expanding the university’s in-house student accommodation, as well as investing more than £40m to improve the student experience.
Making assessment and feedback from academics more relevant to students was identified as a key task, as well as spreading best practice across departments.
“The whole university community worked hard, and throughout the whole university, from the gardeners to top professors, they all understand our priorities,” Lu says.
“If you ask anyone on campus, ‘What do you know about the key missions of the University of Surrey?’ they can tell you. Maybe the cleaners don’t know so much about research but they understand a lot about the student experience.”
That effort paid off, with Surrey’s ranking boosted by improved staff-student ratios, and higher national student survey results.
Surrey’s focus on helping its graduates into careers goes back to its roots as Battersea Polytechnic Institute in the 1890s, before becoming a university during the wave of higher education expansion in the 1960s. It continues to offer undergraduates the option to take part in its long-running professional training year programme, to spend up to a year of their course based at one of more than 2,000 partner companies or organisations around the world.
While such a training year isn’t unique, it is popular among Surrey students, with as many as half of undergraduates taking part. Almost all of them go on to get highly skilled or graduate-level jobs.
Despite what politicians may think, Lu says prospective students and their families have become more concerned about career prospects since the pandemic.
“When we talk to the parents of applicants, they always ask this question – how come your employability is so high? So when we talk about this, around the world, it’s become a very interesting topic,” says Lu.
The University of Lancaster is also thinking hard about the benefits its students can inherit. Prof Andy Schofield, Lancaster’s vice-chancellor, says an impact study commissioned by the university “came back with some extraordinary statistics” about the value of a Lancaster degree.
“Even when you put in all the costs of the debt, the servicing of that debt and living costs while at university, for a student you are £67,000 better off by coming to Lancaster for your first degree. So it’s an investment that pays off,” Schofield says. “It’s good for our graduates and it’s good for the country, and there’s a similar benefit for the industries they end up working for.”
Lancaster’s aim is to “build skills into the curriculum, things that are perhaps peripheral to your course but are going to be vital to your next stage of employment”, according to Schofield, while giving extra help to students who may need it.
“We are always conscious that we have a wide range of students. Some will come with ready-formed networks to make employability straightforward, but we also work very carefully with underrepresented groups, such as first in families [to go to university], who sometimes don’t have the networks that others do,” says Schofield.
“For them we put in more support, including mentoring opportunities through to giving them support to get to interviews that they need. That stretches throughout the broader student journey from being a potential applicant right the way through to graduating with us. And we’ve been doing that for some years now.”
Lancaster has been a model of consistency in the Guardian’s rankings, sitting in the top 15 for more than a decade. This year it is 11th, for the third year in a row, driven by high satisfaction with its teaching and low drop-out rates.
But the university is running what it calls its “curriculum transformation project”, aiming to rethink what a Lancaster degree means, in consultation with its students.
“Ten years ago, we thought the thing every student wanted was choice and lots of flexibility. But our students are now saying that overwhelming choice is not what they want. They want to see a curated route, and they want coherence and consistency,” Schofield says.
“Helping people understand and put more time into making their choices, rather than just presenting them a huge number of choices they could make, that’s responding to student need.”
Graduate employability is one of the University of Bath’s greatest strengths, keeping it in the top 10 thanks to career prospects that rank alongside the upper echelon of Russell Group institutions.
Prof Cassie Wilson, Bath’s pro-vice-chancellor for student experience, says about two-thirds of its students go on work placements. “This gives students an opportunity to utilise and develop their skills in a workplace setting – one of the key things that ensures we do very well in employability stats,” she says.
Bath has also started its own summer internship programme that this year took on 26 students for paid placements across the university, complete with free accommodation.
Wilson rejects the idea that universities are unconcerned by their graduates’ employability. “Of course they come here to get a degree so there has to be an academic element. But these things are not mutually exclusive.”
She adds: “We offer academic programmes but we ensure that employability skills and transferable skills are part of that academic programme. It’s embedded throughout the curriculum so that even those who decide not to do anything have to engage with the elements in their programme.”