York! What is it good for?

I generally don’t pay much attention to the Sunday Times Good University Guide anymore. Before I went to university however, it was a different matter, as I poured over every page, weighing up each university’s good and bad points, which facilities they said they had, how much societies were a part of university life, and so on. Of course now it appears obvious (and I’m not sure why I was so naive before) that each university will do its best to make it sound like their incredible wonderland of learning is “The Place For You”, (that is, apart from The Times’ hilarious misprint last year of our President Tim Ngwena stating that York had too many geeks, rather than geese). Therefore, when I browsed casually through the league table results of the new guide for 2011, I was not too disappointed that York had dropped from 8^th to 13^th. I am, after all, at the University now, so apart from losing the ability to banter quite so ably against friends who went to Durham, it did not seem to matter too much to me. Naturally, the universities are unable to make the statistics that make up the league table sound as palatable as the descriptions as the statistics speak for themselves, but again, I thought, it’s only one newspaper collecting data.

However, on a closer inspection I saw an alarming figure sitting glumly in the middle of the statistics line for York. It was our old friend, “Employment” rising its ugly head once more. This year York scored a dismal 55 out of 100 for Employment, one of the main reasons why it dropped so many places in the league table. It’s true that York has never had a strong footing in this area, however last year it did at least score 64. Whilst it can be argued that in these Times Of Economic Crisis employability is very likely to drop, it hadn’t seemed to have affected the employability figures for the universities surrounding York on the league table as drastically, with some, for example Nottingham, even increasing this year. Despite my usual apathy, I was confused as to how the next university with a lower employability rate than ours was ranked 31^st (bad luck to you, Royal Holloway). What had caused us to be so apparently overlooked by graduate employers? Was it our location? Our career facilities?

 I could analyse how The Times collected this data, which seemed to be based mainly on the graduate level of employment, as well as the type of qualification received by graduates and leavers entering further study, but it wouldn’t really harbour any solutions as each university was naturally looked at using the same method of data collection. Looking at other newspaper’s university rankings, it seemed I had once again become lost in a maze of confusing figures and percentages, for whilst The Guardian ranked York second for employability with my degree, English Literature, if ranked by general employability alone York sunk to the misty realms of 34^th. The point is this – whilst it is clear that each organisation has their own particular way of collecting data that is never going to be 100% accurate, they still all carry warning bells in one way or another about graduate prospects for York.

Whilst I was somewhat aware of this before my brisk read of The Sunday Times, statistics have an unfortunate way of making things very clear, and although I do not suggest that people put all of their faith in a newspaper’s findings (even *gasp* Vision),  there must be at least be a kernel of truth behind what was printed. It’s something that I feel should not be ignored for much longer (and not just because I graduate next year). An Employability Week may have been a good /non-existent start last year (depending on whether you walked through Vanbrugh stalls), but it’s not enough. The careers department may be trying to provide the best service they can for York students, but one week is not much to make that apparent. I’m not asking for a “We Are Golden” month, just more public signs that our university and student’s union is at least aware and attempting to combat this strange yet slightly alarming fact about The University of York, which, from what I have seen, does not seem to deserve such low rates of employability. And dear lord please don’t create another event named after a Mika song, or next year it might be the York dropout rates that let us down.