̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - labour market

All in a day’s work

lw355 — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 08:54:24 +0000

Researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge are helping to understand the world of work – the good, the bad, the fair and the future.

Christopher Burns on Unsplash

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Graduate earnings: what you study and where matters – but so does parents’ income

fpjl2 — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 09:27:34 +0000

Latest research has shown that graduates from richer family backgrounds earn significantly more after graduation than their poorer counterparts, even after completing the same degrees from the same universities.

̽��ֱ��finding is one of many from a new study, published today, which looks at the link between earnings and students’ background, degree subject and university.

̽��ֱ��research also found that those studying medicine and economics earn far more than those studying other degree subjects, and that there is considerable variation in graduates’ earnings depending on the university attended.

̽��ֱ��study was carried out by the Institute of Fiscal Studies and the universities of Cambridge and Harvard, including Professor Anna Vignoles from Cambridge’s Faculty of Education. It is the first time a ‘big data’ approach has been used to look at how graduate earnings vary by institution of study, degree subject and parental income.

̽��ֱ��researchers say that many other factors beyond graduate earnings, such as intrinsic interest, will and should drive student choice. However, they write that the research shows the potential value of providing some useful information that might inform students’ choice of degree – particularly to assist those from more disadvantaged backgrounds who might find it harder to navigate the higher education system.

“It would seem important to ensure there is adequate advice and guidance given that graduates’ future earnings are likely to vary depending on the institution and subject they choose, with implications for social mobility,” write the researchers in the study’s executive summary.

̽��ֱ��research used anonymised tax data and student loan records for 260,000 students up to ten years after graduation. ̽��ֱ��dataset includes cohorts of graduates who started university in the period 1998-2011 and whose earnings (or lack of earnings) are then observed over a number of tax years. ̽��ֱ��paper focuses on the tax year 2012/13.

̽��ֱ��study found that those from richer backgrounds (defined as being approximately from the top 20% of households of those applying to higher education in terms of family income) did better in the labour market than the other 80% of students.

̽��ֱ��average gap in earnings between students from higher and lower income backgrounds is £8,000 a year for men and £5,300 a year for women, ten years after graduation.

Even after taking account of subject studied and the characteristics of the institution of study, the average student from a higher income background earned about 10% more than other students.

̽��ֱ��gap is bigger at the top of the distribution – the 10% highest earning male graduates from richer backgrounds earned about 20% more than the 10% highest earners from relatively poorer backgrounds. ̽��ֱ��equivalent premium for the 10% highest earning female graduates from richer backgrounds was 14%.

̽��ֱ��study also showed that graduates are much more likely to be in work, and earn much more than non-graduates. Non-graduates are twice as likely to have no earnings as are graduates ten years on (30% against 15% for the cohort who enrolled in higher education in 1999).

Partly as a result of this, half of non-graduate women had earnings below £8,000 a year at around age 30, say the researchers. Only a quarter of female graduates were earning less than this. Half were earning more than £21,000 a year.

Among those with significant earnings (which the researchers define as above £8,000 a year), median earnings for male graduates ten years after graduation were £30,000. For non-graduates of the same age median earnings were £21,000. ̽��ֱ��equivalent figures for women with significant earnings were £27,000 and £18,000.

“ ̽��ֱ��research illustrates strongly that, for most graduates, higher education leads to much better earnings than those earned by non-graduates, although students need to realise that their subject choice is important in determining how much of an earnings advantage they will have,” said Professor Vignoles.

̽��ֱ��researchers also found substantial differences in earnings according to which university was attended, as well as which subject was studied. They say however that this is in large part driven by differences in entry requirements.

For instance, more than 10% of male graduates from LSE, Oxford and Cambridge were earning in excess of £100,000 a year ten years after graduation, with LSE graduates earning the most. LSE was the only institution with more than 10% of its female graduates earning in excess of £100,000 a year ten years on.

Even without focusing on the very top, the researchers say they found a large number of institutions (36 for men and 10 for women) had 10% of their graduates earning more than £60,000 a year ten years on. At the other end of the spectrum, there were some institutions (23 for men and 9 for women) where the median graduate earnings were less than those of the median non-graduate ten years on.

However, the researchers say that it is important to put this in context. “Given regional differences in average wages, some very locally focused institutions may struggle to produce graduates whose wages outpace English wide earnings, which includes those living in London where full time earnings for males are around 50% higher than in some other regions, such as Northern Ireland,” they write.

In terms of earnings according to subject, medical students were easily the highest earners at the median ten years out, followed by those who studied economics. For men, median earnings for medical graduates were about £50,000 after ten years, and for economics graduates £40,000.

Those studying the creative arts had the lowest earnings, and earned no more on average than non-graduates. However, the researchers say that some of these earnings differences are, of course, attributable to differences in student intake – since students with different levels of prior achievement at A-level take different subject options.

“When we account for different student intakes across subjects, only economics and medicine remain outliers with much higher earnings at the median as compared to their peers in other subjects,” write the researchers.

After allowing for differences in the characteristics of those who take different subjects, male medical graduates earn around £13,000 more at the median than similar engineering and technology graduates, the gap for women is approximately £16,000. Both male and female medical graduates earn around £14,000 more at the median than similar law graduates.

“Earnings vary substantially with university, subject, gender and cohort,” said study co-author Neil Shepherd of Harvard ̽��ֱ��. “This impacts on which parts of the HE sector the UK Government funds through the subsidy inherent within income contingent student loans. ̽��ֱ��next step in the research is to quantifying that variation in funding, building on today's paper.”

Reference:
Institute for Fiscal Studies working paper: 'How English domiciled graduate earnings vary with gender, institution attended, subject and socio-economic background', Jack Britton , Lorraine Dearden , Neil Shephard and Anna Vignoles.

First ‘big data’ research approach to graduate earnings reveals significant variations depending on student background, degree subject and university attended.

̽��ֱ��research illustrates strongly that, for most graduates, higher education leads to much better earnings than those earned by non-graduates, although students need to realise that their subject choice is important in determining how much of an earnings advantage they will have

Anna Vignoles

Sir Cam

Sidney Sussex General Admission, Cambridge 2012

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Soul seller: the man who moved people

lw355 — Thu, 20 Feb 2014 09:00:14 +0000

Johannes Tschudi was 23 years old when he and his wife Anna left Germany in 1749 aboard the Crown in search of work and a new life on American soil. He was to take the perilous voyage across the Atlantic a further four times – a remarkable number considering how many migrants, including his wife Anna, died on these trips. But perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that between his first and last voyage, Johannes Tschudi transformed from a trafficked migrant to enter the business of selling souls – he became a human trafficker.

̽��ֱ��notion of human trafficking is a familiar one today: individuals, either lured by the prospect of a better life or coerced, are recruited, transported, harboured and ultimately exploited by the trafficker. ̽��ֱ��United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that at any one time this billion-dollar business is responsible for 2.5 million victims, many of whom will end up in forced labour, slavery, prostitution or begging.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, trafficking was connected with a rather different purpose, as Cambridge historian, and Fellow of Trinity Hall, Dr William O’Reilly explained: “Trafficking speeded up the establishment of new settlements in America and eastern Europe, where a labour force was needed. This was a time when people were resigned to the inevitability of emigration. Borders were relatively close and various wars had left individuals questioning their long-term safety. In the 18th century alone, as many as one million emigrated from their homelands in western and central Europe to start new lives, mostly in North America and Hungary.”

In fact, the German people, O’Reilly finds, were one of the most migratory of all national groups at this time. Yet the role of the traffickers to populate these new societies has been largely overlooked.

His research, to be published as a book in 2014, provides fresh insight into the activities of these people movers, arguing that their actions kick-started the first systemisation of migration: “Until the process of moving people became a profitable business enterprise, and connections were made between the supply and demand for human cargo, large-scale migration could not occur.”

On Tschudi’s first journey in 1749, he was one of 476 migrants all connected to him by blood or village; they had been recruited by Johannes Marti. On his final journey in 1767, Tschudi had recruited all 62 passengers on board the Sally bound for Philadelphia. “It seems likely that Marti was, at least in part, responsible for the recruitment of Tschudi as a migrant to the Americas and may have facilitated his re-invention as a recruiting agent himself,” said O’Reilly. “This was a chain migration, but it was also a chain recruitment, where the apprentice learnt from the master agent.”

In studies of migration, movement of people is often considered in terms of ‘push and pull’, in which labour shortages in one area might pull migrants, and poor conditions at home might push them. “But this model does not adequately explain European migration before the 19th century; it would suggest that all migrants acted freely and independently,” said O’Reilly.

“This was not the case here. It was more often directed by traffickers towards a specific territory because of the financial reward they would accrue and it was done so through their command of a niche market in information. By selling labour bonds – a ceel in Dutch – these traffickers sold on more than a person’s labour; they sold their soul, or ziel. Contemporaries considered that these labour-bond sellers became 18th-century soul sellers, the beginning of the modern trafficker.”

O’Reilly’s painstaking study of ships’ logs, maps, newspapers, arrest warrants, customs documents, river networks and letters, across seven countries, has enabled him to paint a remarkable picture of the complex processes that were at work. “Traffickers provided a bridge to a new life in a new land for those wishing to cross. It was a market where labour was retailed most successfully if people like Tschudi acted as brokers, filling ships with ‘human freight’ for the transatlantic crossing.”

In effect, the traffickers were walking propaganda machines. “They had to convince would-be migrants of the benefits of migration, to the point of underhand deception. As one example, some were told ‘roasted pigeons would fly into their mouths without having to work for them’.”

̽��ֱ��traffickers also had to thwart negative stories about the harrowing journey fed back by previous migrants. One traveller wrote: “hunger, thirst, and scarcity of all help had cost the lives of the majority on the ship.” Another that many “came close to murdering one another” in the cramped conditions. There were even tales of having to cook and eat dead fellow passengers. O’Reilly estimates mortality at around 15% or even higher as shipping firms in Holland, England and America, seeking to maximise profits, continued to raise the average number of emigrants per vessel.

“Tschudi, and others like him, learned quickly that by counteracting these negative descriptions of the journey with stories of limitless land and bread, of freedom and prosperity, he could turn a handsome profit,” said O’Reilly.

Traffickers could access information about opportunities abroad that was not generally known to potential emigrants. “For me, one definition of trafficking is the sourcing and supply of information leading to migration. In this regard, this is a story across time. From what I’ve found looking at contemporary situations – human trafficking from Moldova, for example – nothing has changed terribly much. ̽��ֱ��information comes from migrants who return home typically in the employ of other agents, and who then gain money for every migrant they recruit in turn.”

“It opened up information channels for those who, through illiteracy or geographic isolation, would have remained ignorant of the possibilities open to them,” he explained. “But the information was endowed with inflated images and delivered by those adept at marketing it for their audience.”

Tschudi’s dishonesty was publicly revealed. Shortly after the Sally docked in Philadelphia, a letter appeared in the local newspaper on behalf of all the migrants who had taken the journey, denouncing him as a “paragon of wickedness, an arrant liar and an out-an-out deceiver” who had “enticed and seduced nearly fifty people” to travel to America, in part through blackmail, in part through the threat of physical violence. “Their resentment was focused on the arduous journey,” said O’Reilly, “but no doubt by this stage the migrants would also have encountered the realities of settling in a new country and finding suitable employment, and have come to realise that not all was paved with riches as he had described.”

“Tschudi refused to accept the accusations levelled against him but his accusers would not go away,” added O’Reilly, who estimates that migrants would have paid £5–10 for the privilege of emigrating. “Denouncing him, they said that he had tricked them with his tales of encouragement, while all the while ‘he took a sum of money from a merchant… with the promise of delivering to him a number of people’.” Men, and women traffickers too, grew rich on the profit of human trafficking.

O’Reilly’s research highlights the role of traffickers like Tschudi as key to the process of migration. “Facilitator, escort, at times swindler and cheat, the human trafficker bound an ever-shrinking world together with ties of information and opportunity, and in effect aided the development of global labour markets for Europeans.”

For further information about this story, please contact Louise Walsh at louise.walsh@admin.cam.ac.uk

People trafficking is a billion-dollar business with a history that spans centuries. A new study identifies the beginnings of the modern trafficker – the men and women who “sold souls” in 17th- and 18th-century Germany.

This was a chain migration, but it was also a chain recruitment, where the apprentice learnt from the master agent

William O'Reilly

Harper's Weekly (New York), November 7, 1874 (Library of Congress)

German migrants boarding a steamer in Hamburg, Germany, to travel to America

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes