This infuriating article from the @thetimes – and the ‘research’ it is based on – is classist (and every other -ist). It's inaccurate bullshit on so many levels and as such not great journalism, @nicolawoolcock.

Ranty thread.
1/ https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/universities-urged-to-better-prepare-students-for-jobs-vwt8tx9lz?shareToken=366f3bfa3278187db3010d60b6b2f8e6

There is a long-running debate as to how 'work-ready' graduates should be. Employers have long complained of a deficit in 'young people' as they enter the workforce. But the responsibility for capacity to work is not - and should not be - all on education/unis. Or students.
2/

It's problematic to train someone – particularly in the face of changing labour markets – to do one job for life; if the situation changes, they’re screwed. Providing a flexible foundation on which employers (and learners themselves) can build is better far over time.
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‘Employability’ as captured in #rankings etc does not refer to real work-readiness at all, but either companies’ perceptions of employability or past rates of employment. Both are deeply flawed.
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The perceptions angle assumes that companies have, over decades, systematically selected graduates from across the HE spectrum and empirically established that those from some countries and some (high status) universities are inherently better than others.
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There is no evidence of this, there can’t be - degrees and jobs are hugely varied. It would take some kind of Gigantosaurus of a longitudinal study controlling for unis, degrees, industries, countries, genders, races/ethnicities, dis-/abilities, classes/castes, and more.
6/

It’s well-established that ‘top’ employers select students from ‘top’ unis for historical reasons, assuming that they’re better. They do this, those people are mostly fine at work, they therefore think they chose the best candidates. There's no real way of knowing this.
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There’s also the homiphily principle, in that ‘top’ employers (primarily white elites) choose people like themselves because they connect with them more easily; this reinforces the idea that they themselves are also ‘top’ people.
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This means that rates of employment are based on (and reproduced by) this social selectivity: the most privileged people get hoovered up by high status unis and are then conveyor-belted into certain kinds of jobs. (This overlaps with the VfM/graduate salaries argument.)
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All this torpedoes claims that student employability rises and falls between universities and countries. It doesn’t, it merely reflects the outcomes of a survey or employment rates. These are subject to economic and political change, ease of mobility, pandemics, and so on.
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So ‘Employability’ in perceptions and rankings etc is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s socially selective, not related to work-readiness at all, and high employability scores simply reproduce high employability scores.

In short, it's biased clustertwattery.

11/End