There has been much comment this year (including from me) on the bad and getting worse employment outcomes for recent graduates. This is based on a four months after completion survey, so some of the result is slower rather than non-transitions into full-time employment.

The latest Beyond Graduation survey looks at graduates three years after completing their degree. It uses a sub-sample of respondents to the original four month out survey three years previously. The sub-sample does have at least one bias, in that its respondents report higher employment rates at four months than did the sample as a whole. But hopefully this does not affect the trend information.

As the chart below shows, full-time employment rates (of all in the sample) seem to have stabilised for the 2010 cohort compared to people who finished the year before. The chart shows that in early 2011 when the 2010 completing cohort was looking for work 55 per cent had a full time job. Three years later in 2014 that had increased to 70 per cent. Not everyone who does not have a full-time job is un- or under-employed, but I report it this way to try to minimise any effects of people who are doing something other than working because they have given up looking for a job.

Conditional on having a full-time job, the rate of professional and managerial employment also seems stable at 84 per cent, which is little-changed over the life of the Beyond Graduation survey.

While the trends in recent graduate employment are concerning, most commentators (including myself) have been cautious about saying that this is necessarily a major long-term problem. It could be, but there is not enough evidence to say that yet. These reasonably good results from the Beyond Graduation Survey support that caution.