Associations between characteristics of students
Progressing from full-time higher education
This dashboard shows how likely students are to progress to managerial or professional employment, further study or have another positive graduate outcome after they have completed a full-time higher education qualification.
- Progression quintile 1 shows groups of students who have the lowest chance of having a positive progression outcome.
- Students in progression quintile 5 have the highest chance of having a positive progression outcome.
- We have calculated the full-time progression measure for UK-domiciled students who have graduated from full-time undergraduate courses at English higher education providers and who have responded to the Graduate Outcomes survey.
- By default the chart shows how all UK-domiciled graduates of full-time undergraduate courses are distributed across the progression quintiles. Where an attribute is selected for all twelve characteristics, then 100 per cent of students will be in a single progression quintile. Otherwise, the chart shows the distribution of students holding the selected characteristics across the progression quintiles.
- Below the chart is the derived quintile. If one or more characteristics remain effectively unselected and are set to ‘—any [characteristic] –‘, then this shows the quintile that has been derived for this student group, based on a weighted average of the distribution of students across all the quintiles.
- Age group = students' age when they started their course.
- Care experience = whether the student has ever spent time in the care of a local authority in England or Wales, or Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland.
- Disability = their self-reported disability status.
- Ethnicity = a detailed description of their ethnicity.
- FSM eligibility = whether or not the student has been eligible to receive free school meals (FSM) in the six years prior to the March census date in their final year of key stage four (year 11).
- IDACI = their 'Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index' quintile. This is a measure of the proportion of children under the age of 16 in low-income households for an area. Only produced for students domiciled in England.
- IMD = their 'Index of Multiple Deprivation' quintile. This is a measure of multiple deprivation of small areas. Only produced for students domiciled in England.
- Local or distance learner= whether or not students live locally to their higher education provider or are distance learners.
- NS-SEC = the socio-economic background for students based on the occupation of the highest earning parent for students who were under 21 when they started their studies or the prior occupation of the student themselves otherwise. Details of the grouping used here can be found in Section 7 of these ONS webpages.
- Parental higher education = whether any of the student's parents have any higher education qualifications.
- Sex = displayed as female, male or other.
- TUNDRA = their ‘TUNDRA’ quintile. TUNDRA is an area-based measure that uses tracking of state-funded mainstream school pupils in England to calculate young participation. Quintile 1 shows the lowest rate of participation and quintile 5 shows the highest. TUNDRA data for students 21-years-old or over is not presented.
The proportions for the different quintiles are based on the population of young people that share the selected characteristics. While these proportions are visually represented here by 100 people the actual number may far exceed 100 or may be below 100.
Due to rounding, the proportions for the different quintiles may not sum to 100 per cent.
In the data download, populations have been rounded to the nearest 5. Groups with 1 or 2 individuals as well as groups which do not exist in the modelling data are shown as having a population of 0.
About this measure
Get the data
- Quintile distributions (Zip)
(Please note that due to the size of this data file, it can only be opened using statistical software packages such as SAS, R or Python.) - Parameter estimates (Excel)
- Parameter estimates (CSV)
30 September 2022 - The measure has been updated.
13 October 2021 - Updated for latest ABCS report
09 February 2021 - Updates to the the existing data.
26 November 2020 - Dashboard updated to reflect new data.
24 January 2020 - Access groups by student characteristics data files updated to add lines that were missing from the original file
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