Employment prospects for Earth science graduates

With geoscience-related degrees seeing a decline in applicants, George Jameson (Diversity and Inclusion Project Lead) discusses the value of further education in Earth science graduate outcomes.

For some time, we have wondered about how beneficial or useful obtaining a degree in the Earth sciences can be for those graduating in the United Kingdom. This question has become more pressing in recent years. Prospective students want to know how useful a degree is and what potential career paths await them as they enter the workforce should they choose to study it.

It was time that we looked into the evidence in order to try answer this question.

We began our evidence gathering by reaching out and getting in touch with all universities in the UK who award Earth science degrees. We know that this information is collected by universities and had assumed that most would be happy to help us with this project. Unfortunately, this approach was not as fruitful as we had anticipated. Although some were happy to share the information, many were not. In fact, too many for us to be able to draw worthwhile conclusions from.

Thankfully, through the Higher Education Statistic Agency’s Graduate Outcomes survey we were able to purchase a dataset detailing the status of recent Earth science graduates. The survey is the biggest annual social survey in the UK and collects the current status of graduates 15 months after they finish their studies. The Graduate Outcomes survey is the successor to the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DHLE) survey and began publishing data form the 2017/18 academic year. We were able to acquire the dataset covering the 2017/18 – 2019/20 academic years.

With the data now available to us, we could finally interrogate it and see what we can learn and share with the community. You can access the full report by clicking the link.  

There were some limitations for us, especially when trying to answer our main question.

• The data does not explicitly indicate that a graduate is in relevant graduate employment as a direct result of their degree. Rather, we have relied on where graduates indicated that their degree was necessary (required or advantageous) in securing their current job.
• Sharing low numbers is not permitted by HESA, meaning that we had to suppress that information so that explains the instances of the * symbol throughout.

In total 5980, graduates submitted their information across the 3-year period. This includes fully and partially completed surveys. Of which, 2415 were female (40%) and 3563 were male (60%).

The report breaks down the results of each academic year into the percentage of graduates in some form of employment following graduation (1,329 students). Of this number, 67% stated that their degree was necessary (either required or advantageous) in securing their job.

The 67% of employed graduates who stated their degree was necessary to obtain their job are broken down further by levels of educational attainment in the tables below. This data suggests that graduates with higher levels of educational attainment are more likely to utilise their qualification to obtain employment, with a higher percentage of postgraduates stating their degree as a necessity for securing their subsequent employment than First Degree or master’s students. In turn, this may suggest postgraduates are more likely to enter subject-specific roles on graduation.

2017/2018 (2,015 graduates)

2018/2019 (1,985 graduates)

2019/2020 (1,979 graduates)

The remainder of the report provides a breakdown of characteristics, subject of study as well as graduate outcomes for each academic year allowing you to gain a more detailed understanding of the Earth science graduate landscape in the UK.

Should you have any questions or suggestions on this topic, please do get in touch with us at [email protected].

Full report available here: https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/~/media/shared/documents/education%20and%20careers/Careers/Earth%20Science%20Graduate%20Outcomes%20Report.pdf