Graduate Employment Rate is defined as the percentage of graduates who go on to paid (non-voluntary) work within 15 months of finishing their degree. We consider any mode of employment (full-time or part-time), even if unknown. We do not consider graduates who are on voluntary or unpaid work, continuing further study, or unavailable for work due to military service, disability, travel, or caring needs. The latter categories of graduates are removed from any calculation, so as not to disadvantage any institution. This leads to the following definition of Graduate Employment Rate:
Headcount of employed students /
(Headcount of employed students + Headcount of unemployed students) * 100,
where employed students are those with the above mentioned modes of employment (i.e. full-time or part-time).
Universities or third-party providers (such as HESA) usually run employment surveys to get such data. We require the response rate to be more that 20% to consider the survey results representative.
Whenever Graduate Employment Rate is not available, we use the minimum recorded rate for the country (or region, if the number of domestic data points are insufficient).
If the surveys were conducted sooner than the 15 month post-graduation period, we apply a positive adjustment to take into account the decreased likelihood of employment at the stage of survey.
To calculate the Graduate Employment Index (as opposed to the underlying Graduate Employment Rate), we consider two factors:
a) the difference between each institution’s rate and the average in the location/country in which they reside (based on QS dataset);
b) the difference between each institution’s rate and the world average (again based on QS dataset).
To preclude significant anomalies, we use mean normalisation in both cases. Two normalised values are then combined as 70:30 towards domestic component.