Placements, Inequality
and Graduate Outcomes
Drawing on a bespoke administrative record of placement participation across five cohorts of UK graduates, this paper examines how access to placements and the wage, employment and job quality returns to them are patterned by ethnicity and social class.
Research Summary
Work placements are widely promoted as a route into good graduate jobs and a lever for social mobility. But who actually gets them, and do they pay off equally for everyone who does?
This programme of research interrogates that claim using a bespoke dataset constructed with the Higher Education Statistics Agency, covering five cohorts of UK graduates (2018/19–2022/23) and built around an administrative placement marker that has not previously been available to researchers. Unlike prior work, which has relied on single institutions and self-reported measures, the data offers a national-scale, administratively measured picture of placement participation alongside detailed information on wages, employment, occupational level, subjective job quality, and graduates’ social and educational backgrounds.
Three linked papers examine the question from different angles: how access to placements and the labour market returns to them are stratified by ethnicity and social class; how the wage premium varies across the earnings distribution rather than at the average alone; and how returns differ within business and management graduates, where placement provision is most concentrated.
The work speaks to ongoing debates about employability, inequality, and the role of higher education in shaping graduate transitions.
Research team
Partners and funding
This work was supported by the Manchester Metropolitan University Faculty of Business and Law Research Accelerator Grant number 5125167.
Project enquiries
Contact details of lead researcher
Dr Sean Brophy: s.brophy@mmu.ac.uk