An Oxbridge degree is no longer a guarantee of a lucrative job. There have been radical changes in recruitment procedures in recent years and arts students in particular are facing increasing competition in the job market.

Claims from all quarters suggest that the traditional advantage of the Oxbridge degree has lost its edge. Employers have begun to value skills that are more commercially relevant than punting and in spreading their recruitment net wider over the last few years, are finding these abilities in graduates from other universities. The result of this is that Oxbridge graduates, particularly those with arts degrees, are finding it harder to secure employment.

Over the past few years this trend has become more and more marked. In the Oxford and Cambridge Careers Handbook of 2005, Glen Owen of the Mail on Sunday claimed that “whatever they say in their publicity material, many of the blue chips will not look far beyond the two old universities for their top recruits”. Asked whether he still considers this to be the case, he said “I think it still carries a cachet with certain employers, but, if you are talking in crude monetary terms, a physics degree from Sheffield can be of more scarcity value than English from Cambridge in terms of the salary you will command”.

Big firms now emphasise their indifference to the provenance of their graduate applicants. Even Charles Macleod, UK Resourcing Leader of the old Cambridge mainstay in the City, PricewaterhouseCoopers, said his firm is “interested in the skills the students bring rather than simply the university they have attended”. Rosalyn Hillard, from the graduate recruitment team at Goldman Sachs, admits that times have changed. “I think the old-fashioned milkround was more Oxbridge based,” she said, “but ours is an increasingly global workforce. We now recruit from the rest of the UK, from France, India and elsewhere.” Kate Lear from Oxbridgelife.com agreed that an Oxbridge degree is now only an advantage “if it is backed up by good interpersonal skills, career focus and relevant work experience”.

The Cambridge Careers service confirms that the job market is more competitive than ever before. Gordon Chesterman, director at Stuart House, said that there is a “trend for employers to target many more universities than in the ‘“pre-web’ days”and that the “blunderbuss” approach of job seeking by sending a letter and a CV is gone forever.

The problem is more marked for arts graduates. Those with arts degrees are less sought-after in the job market and are often looking for jobs in more competitive fields with less clear progression from degree to workplace. While a Cambridge degree will nearly always get students through the application stage, students often fail at interview due to “lack of prior research, poor evidence of enthusiasm and commitment to the job and sometimes arrogance”. This certainly seems to be the case for many Cambridge arts graduates. History graduate James Kinman agreed that a Cambridge degree “gets you to interview” but lamented the fact that “from then on you need a personality”.

Tom Woolford