Welcome! Higher education is facing a growing accountability moment. As students ask harder questions about the value of a degree, universities are also having to think more carefully about how they are perceived — not just by those within their institutions, but by the wider world.

This week, we look at two sides of that challenge. Our first piece explores why universities need to take greater responsibility for graduate employability as the world of work changes. In our second, we examine the blind spots that can emerge when institutions try to understand and manage their reputations.

Stay insightful,
Anton John Crace
Editor in Chief, QS Insights Magazine
QS Quacquarelli Symonds

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A new era of accountability in graduate employability

By Seb Murray

In brief

• Rising tuition costs and AI disruptions force universities to prove the career value of higher education degrees.
• Declining entry-level roles and shifting employer expectations leave graduates facing an unforgiving, highly competitive job market.
• Institutions must embed work placements, human skills and AI literacy directly throughout all degree programs.

For generations, universities have sold degrees on a promise: invest in your education today, and it will pay off over a lifetime. Today, more students — perhaps more than ever — are asking whether that bargain still holds up.

Even graduates from Britain’s elite Russell Group universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, now owe an average of more than £52,000 in student debt. They are the first generation to pay the £9,000 fees, which tripled in 2012.

Students are feeling the squeeze: paying more in many cases and asking tougher questions to boot. Two-thirds of UK students report running out of money before the end of term, while alternatives like degree apprenticeships are now booming. Starts on those rose more than 20 percent last year — ten times faster than undergraduate enrolments.

But this isn’t just a British problem. In both the UK and the US, the graduate wage premium is shrinking. In the US, it has fallen by almost 10 percent in the past four years. The return is still there. It’s just not as handsome as it once was.

That doesn’t mean university has lost its value. But it does mean the burden of proof has become that much higher. As tuition costs rise, the graduate jobs market contracts and AI upends entry-level work, students are increasingly asking: what am I getting in return for all that time, money and effort?

In the past, universities produced graduates and employers finished the job. But that deal is breaking down. Companies are hiring more cautiously, expecting fresh recruits to contribute from day one, while AI takes over many of the routine tasks that once trained junior employees.

And universities are no longer competing only with each other. They’re competing with alternatives like apprenticeships and online credentials, while facing a growing expectation that education should lead directly to work.

In that sense, a degree is no longer taken at face value, and universities increasingly have to prove its worth.

Unfortunately, the graduate jobs market has become far more unforgiving. Economic uncertainty has slowed hiring across advanced economies, AI is cutting out some entry-level work, and employers are expecting more from the graduates they do hire.  

According to recruitment platform Handshake, graduate job postings in the US slumped 15 percent between July 2024 and mid-April 2025 compared with a year earlier. Employers can therefore afford to be more demanding.

Claire McCartney, Senior Policy Adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the body for HR and people development, points to research showing that half of UK employers don’t think young people are ready for the world of work. Many say graduates still lack the workplace behaviours and social skills they need to succeed.

“A key challenge is that fewer young people are combining work and learning while in full-time education, reducing their ability to develop the broader workplace skills that employers value,” McCartney says.

Lucy Bisset, Senior Director at recruitment firm Robert Walters, says the graduate jobs market is caught in a paradox. Employers are cutting entry-level hiring because of rising costs, economic uncertainty and AI, while expecting graduates to arrive with more workplace skills and experience.

“Graduates can only gain those skills if organisations are able to provide the initial opportunities,” says Bisset. “As entry-level roles continue to decline, this skills gap will only widen.”

The squeeze is already apparent. According to the job site Indeed, graduate vacancies in the UK have fallen to their lowest level since 2018, with employers advertising a third fewer entry-level roles than a year ago. That makes the question for universities less about whether they should prepare students for work, and more about how they should do it.

The answer doesn’t lie in creating a bigger university careers service. It’s in embedding employability much more deeply into the degree itself.

AI makes that shift more urgent. As routine work becomes increasingly automated, the skills that make graduates valuable are changing at pace. Adzuna estimates UK job postings for graduate roles have fallen by almost two-thirds since ChatGPT launched in late 2022 — roughly twice the decline seen across entry-level jobs overall.

“Being able to use AI to automate many tasks that predominantly involve routine processes or administration means that ‘human skills’ will increasingly be seen as how high-performing professionals differentiate themselves,” says Gemma Kenyon, Director of Employability at City St George’s, University of London.

Teamwork, creativity, leadership and critical thinking, she argues, will become even more valuable.

That doesn’t mean graduates can ignore AI. Quite the opposite. “Graduates will need to be confident using AI to improve their efficiency at the routine tasks,” she says. That means understanding different AI tools, writing better prompts and, just as importantly, knowing when not to trust the answer.

“We will need to teach students critical thinking and a solid grounding in the fundamentals... to interrogate AI outputs and spot when AI has made errors,” Kenyon says.

And that means AI can no longer be taught as a specialist subject. “AI training will need to become a mainstream part of the content of all university courses, not just in STEM disciplines,” adds Kenyon.

Universities also need to blur the line between study and work. Assessments should reflect the problems graduates will face, while placements and employer projects become a much larger part of the degree. The shift has already begun: UK universities have pledged work experience for more than 1 million students amid growing concern that too many graduates still enter the workplace unprepared.

McCartney at the CIPD says universities could do more in this respect by “partnering with employers to provide work exposure and experience” while embedding it throughout degree programmes. It also means developing “soft skills such as communication, self-management and problem solving alongside core capabilities including digital skills”.

Placements are one of the best ways to bring those skills to life. Bisset at Robert Walters says they give students something employers increasingly value: real experience.

“A professional work placement not only provides students with workplace experience and practical application of their area of study, but also allows them to expand their professional networks, develop key soft skills and gain a better understanding of the career paths available,” she says.

The benefits don’t stop at graduation either. “It’s also very common for high-performing students to secure a position with their placement company after graduation,” Bisset adds. Employers gain, too.

“Providing student placements is a key opportunity to identify future talent and build a pipeline of talented young professionals before they enter the job market,” she says.

But work experience alone is not enough. If the workplace is changing faster than universities can update what they teach, employability also becomes a curriculum problem.

Keeping pace will require universities to adapt courses more quickly and strengthen links with employers so curricula evolve alongside the workplace rather than behind it.

The QS World Future Skills Index 2027 suggests many institutions are struggling to keep up, with employer demand for human, AI, digital and green skills changing faster than higher education can respond. Human skills, in particular, remain among the hardest capabilities for employers to find.

City St George’s Kenyon argues AI literacy and ethics should become part of every degree, with teaching built around the kinds of problems graduates will actually face at work. Some universities are already taking that approach.

At Canada’s University of Waterloo, AI is used to track changing employer demand, identify emerging skills gaps and help students understand which capabilities employers are looking for. Those same insights can then feed back into curriculum design, helping courses keep pace with a labour market that is changing very quickly indeed.

This all points to a bigger shift. In many ways, higher education is entering a new era of accountability.

Students are paying more and entering a tougher job market, and competing in workplaces being upended by AI. In return, graduates increasingly expect universities to help bridge the gap between education and employment.

That means making employability part of the degree rather than something students discover in the careers office during their final year; bringing employers into the curriculum; giving students meaningful time in the workplace; and ensuring every graduate knows how to use AI, question it and apply the human judgement it still can’t replace.

Universities won’t necessarily create more graduate jobs. But they can give graduates a better chance of competing for the ones that exist.

For as the cost of university continues to rise, students won’t just pay for a degree. They’ll expect a career.

Seb Murray is a journalist and editor who writes often for the Financial Times and has written for The Times, The Guardian, The Economist, The Evening Standard and BBC Worklife. He focuses on higher education and global business. He also produces a wide range of content for a range of corporate and academic institutions. Seb is also a recognised expert on higher education and speaks at international conferences.

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Reputation's blind spot

By Narayani Prakash and Juan Carlos Mejía-Cuartas

In brief

• Most universities prioritise reputation as a strategic pillar but admit significant difficulty in effectively measuring and managing it.
• Current tracking targets internal stakeholders like students, leaving a "blind spot" regarding vital external academic peer perceptions.
• Institutions must replace fragmented messaging with unified strategies and systematic tools to track and earn genuine global recognition.

You don't need to ask a university whether reputation matters. Look at almost any mission statement, and it's already there — a promise to be "world-class," a claim to "excellence", a nod to "global impact". Somewhere between three and four out of every five universities write some version of this into their own founding language.

Ask how their reputation is performing — better, worse, holding steady — and the confidence becomes noticeably subdued. Not because nobody's looking, but because almost everyone who is looking will tell you that it's harder to track than they'd like to admit.

85% of institution representatives rate reputation as "extremely" or "very" important to their performance strategy

A recent survey of over 2,000 institutional representatives conducted by QS quantified this gap. Bringing in respondents from almost 400 institutions in 132 countries, the survey found that while universities prioritised reputation, their reasoning and their confidence in their ability to influence it fluctuated depending on their rank.

Higher education has decided reputation is too important to leave to chance and then discovered that managing it is considerably harder than believing in it.

Push a little further, and the shape of that difficulty starts to show — and it shows up in one direction more than the other. Universities are fairly confident about what reputation gets them: a stronger student pipeline, above all, with 46% of respondents indicating reputation helped them "attract top students", the most selected benefit.

Higher-ranked institutions extend that logic to faculty — reputation as a magnet for academic talent. Mid-tier institutions read reputation as a lever for climbing the rankings. Lower-ranked and unranked institutions treat it as a way to earn credibility through collaboration. Different tiers, different games, same word.

The confidence in what reputation provides is not matched with confidence in managing those who decide whether an institution is reputable: external stakeholders. About a third call their institution effective with stakeholders overall (35%). Roughly as many say the same about academic peers (37%). Employers edge out both, but only just, at 39%.

It is a strange kind of consistency. Institutions aren't failing anywhere in particular — they're just not especially confident anywhere, including with the scholarly community beyond their own walls.

Employers get a small edge, likely because their feedback is easier to read: placements and employability are among the more visible outcomes. Academic peers and the broader stakeholder base are murkier — reputation you can't easily point to, built at a distance rather than in daily contact.

Which is the real story here.

When institution representatives describe how they measure reputation, what they're mostly describing is a check-in with people who already have reason to think well of them: students; employers already hiring their graduates; staff; alumni. Audiences with a built-in stake in a favourable answer are tracked well ahead of anyone with no such stake — peer institutions elsewhere, governments and third-party bodies, the wider public. The further an audience sits from the institution's own community, the less likely anyone's actually measuring what it thinks — true even for institutions with the most to prove to the outside world.

77% vs. 50% track student perception as a reputation metric — versus 50% who track perception among other institutions and academic peers, the closest thing on the list to a genuine outsider's view. Everything further from home — government and third-party bodies (44%), community and social impact (38%), and beyond — trails further still

There's nothing dishonest about that. It's just incomplete. Reputation, in the fullest sense, isn't only what people who already chose you think of you. It's also what strangers think — the employer hiring blind, the peer institution weighing a partnership, the prospective student comparing you against five other logos on a shortlist. That's an audience that reputation has to survive too. And it's the audience the sector's current measurement habits mostly miss.

There's a useful contrast in how QS global reputation surveys tend to approach this. Rather than asking a contact to react to a name already in front of them — is this university good? — the better version of that exercise asks them to nominate the institutions they recognise for excellence in a given field.

Nobody's fed a shortlist. What gets captured isn't an opinion on request; it's unprompted recognition — the institutions that surface in someone's mind without being cued, versus the much larger number whose recognition of excellence stays low simply because they never came up unaided. That's a different kind of signal from asking your own community how it feels about you. It's harder to earn, and it's the one that actually travels.

This isn't a story about institutions being lazy or uninterested; the report makes the opposite case, repeatedly. It's a story about where the instruments happen to be pointed. You can build a very accurate picture of how your own community feels about you and still have almost no idea how you read to the world outside it.

To be fair to the sector: everyone's doing something about this. That's arguably part of the problem.

Reputation, inside most institutions, doesn't belong to one office; it belongs to several at once, and the cast changes depending on who's watching. 58% name Individual Faculty/Academic Departments as mainly responsible for peer reputation. 61% name Career Services & Employer Relations as mainly responsible for employer reputation.

Each audience has its own lead office — sensible in theory, since different audiences genuinely do need different handling. In practice, neither audience has a single owner even after the lead is named — international relations, research offices, alumni teams, communications teams all show up claiming a piece of the same responsibility, for both audiences at once. Which means four or five departments are each telling a version of the same story, in their own words, on their own timeline, with no single editor reconciling them into one coherent narrative. This essentially means that when the world hears from the institution, it may be hearing four or five slightly different institutions.

And the tools mirror the split. Most institutions invest in visibility — putting the message out through digital marketing, PR and branding agencies. Fewer invest in insight — the monitoring, listening and perception-tracking work that would tell them whether any of that visibility is landing. And a meaningful share, 15%, aren't using tools of any kind — reputation managed by instinct and spreadsheet rather than by system. Which means a good number of institutions are broadcasting confidently into a silence they haven't built the means to hear back from.

60% vs. 33% use digital marketing & communication tools to manage reputation, versus 33% who use reputation monitoring or social listening software to actually track it. 15% report using no tools at all — still a manual process

So when institution representatives are asked directly what stands in their way, the answer isn't ambition; it's plumbing. Measuring and tracking reputation effectively tops the list, by a clear margin. Dispersed data across departments and uncoordinated messaging tie for second.

Not a sector short on caring. A sector short on the systems that would let that caring add up to something measurable.

66% cite difficulty measuring and tracking reputation effectively as a top challenge — ahead of dispersed data across departments (54%) and uncoordinated messaging from a lack of unified strategy (54%, tied)

Which brings us back to where we started. Whether reputation matters was never really in question; the sector answered that unanimously. The harder question, the one most institutions still can't answer with much confidence, is who inside their walls could actually tell them — with evidence, not instinct — whether their reputation is rising or falling, and on whose terms it's being judged.

Narayani Prakash is a Senior Product Manager at QS, leading SaaS products that help universities strengthen institutional reputation, stakeholder engagement and global partnerships through data-driven product innovation and strategy.

Juan Carlos Mejía Cuartas is an International Higher Education Manager with 20 years of global leadership experience. He currently leads capacity building strategies for universities worldwide at QS Quacquarelli Symonds.

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