Top employers ask students about parents’ education
STUDENTS applying for summer internships are being asked whether their parents went to university, a report has found, amid fears that middle-class applicants will be “penalised” by leading graduate employers.
Almost half (45 per cent) of the country’s largest graduate recruiters, including top banking, accountancy, law, retail and engineering firms, now ask university students about their socioeconomic status. This is a three-fold increase from 2012, when just 13 per cent of graduate recruiters asked such questions, according to a report published today by the Institute of Student Employers.
The most popular metric used to track socio-economic status was whether the student was the first in their family to go to university, closely followed by whether they attended a state school. They were also asked if they had qualified for free school meals, and about their parents’ jobs.
It comes amid increasing pressure on the UK’S biggest employers to boost
diversity in their workforces. Critics have warned that students applying for internships and jobs could end up being “penalised” because of their background.
Chris Mcgovern, a former government adviser and chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “We cannot appoint second-rate candidates on the basis that they have come from a deprived background. What we actually need to do is raise standards rather than foisting politically correct ideas on to employers.”
He said that while some employers might pay “lip service” to the notion of increasing diversity by asking applicants to fill out forms and then “throwing it in the bin”, others may use it to “penalise” and “discriminate” against middle class students.
Stephen Isherwood, the CEO of the Institute, which represents more than 500 of the country’s leading graduate employers, said that increasing the diversity of employees was one of the biggest concerns among his members.
“You do have employers now using contextualised data. They don’t do positive dissociation, but what they do is use that data to make a level playing field,” he said. “It is not about rejecting an Eton-educated candidate to let someone else through. It is about letting both through [and recognising that] someone from a lower socio-economic background may not have had the same advantages.” He said that the reason employers were focused on diversity was so that they could find the best talent, and overcome a “pale, male and stale” image by “getting it right at graduate entry level”.
Mr Isherwood said that the desire by major firms to increase the diversity of their workforce was “partly politically driven”, adding that widening participation in higher education had also been a “driving force”.
Last month The Daily Telegraph reported that ministers had published a series of socio-economic questions for staff about their backgrounds intended for use by major companies and the Civil Service. Tens of thousands of civil servants will be asked the questions in its annual “people survey” in October.
The Government insisted there were no plans to make the checks a legal duty on firms, but similar initiatives on gender pay became law at a later date.