14.00 -14.10

Welcome, housekeeping and overview of the session

14.10 – 14.30

Rosario Scandurra: Do university career services create genuine economic value or merely redistribute employment opportunities? This study addresses this question using 15 years of data from the Catalan Graduate Follow-Up Survey, covering over 14,000 graduates. To overcome selection bias, we employ an instrumental variable strategy exploiting peer exposure to career services. We estimate a causal wage premium of approximately 8.5% for graduates who secured employment through university career services. Heterogeneity analysis reveals substantially stronger effects for women (15.7%) and graduates without prior work experience (17%), suggesting these services may help reduce labour market inequalities. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework integrating human capital theory, signalling, search theory, and positional competition, we argue that while career services deliver genuine individual returns—particularly for disadvantaged groups—policymakers should interpret aggregate employability metrics with considerable caution.

Including Q&A

14.30 – 14.55

Sean Brophy: From Data to Debate: Using Administrative and Secondary Data to Drive Research Impact in Higher Education. This session uses two recent research projects to illustrate how rigorous quantitative analysis of administrative and secondary data can generate both scholarly contributions and sustained policy engagement. The first, published in Studies in Higher Education, examines the ethnicity degree awarding gap for a single cohort of English graduates using HESA student records. That article led directly to a Times Higher Education piece and a HEPI blog post, and ultimately to this invitation. The session will report early results from follow-up analysis extending this work to 775,247 full-time, UK-domiciled, first-degree qualifiers across five cohorts (2018/19–2022/23). Preliminary findings suggest the origins of the gap differ markedly by ethnic group: for Black students it appears to originate within higher education or in unobserved factors, whereas for Pakistani and Bangladeshi students it appears rooted in inequality accumulated during compulsory education. This body of work has also led to ONS Accredited Researcher status and research using the Longitudinal Educational Outcomes dataset to examine connections between compulsory schooling, higher education, and the labour market.

The second project, also in Studies in Higher Education, examined graduate job quality for the 2018/19 cohort using Graduate Outcomes data. Commentary appeared in Wonkhe and The Conversation, the latter attracting over 20,000 reads in its first week, leading to a Times Higher Education conference invitation, a BBC Radio 5 interview request, and a direct editorial relationship enabling future pieces to bypass open submission.

The session reflects on what this pipeline looks like in practice: how peer-reviewed research creates credibility, how accessible writing builds audiences, and how sustained engagement with outlets like HEPI, Wonkhe, and The Conversation compounds into a national profile and direct access to policymakers and media.

Including Q&A

14.55 – 15.30

Break-out rooms for discussion and final plenary discussion