All students have been misinformed on job prospects

It’s not just psychology students who have been misinformed on their post-graduate job prospects. It turns out that the student information website has made similar mistakes in calculating the job prospects of all university students.

Studiekeuze123.nl’s information website now provides the following warning with each academic study discussed: ‘PLEASE NOTE: The job prospect figure presented on this Studie in Cijfers student information website is incorrect.’

Incorrect psychology figures

The warning is a response to an investigation carried out by TV show De Monitor, whose journalists refused to believe that 86 percent of all psychology graduates would find an academic-level job within a year and a half of graduating, as the student information website reported.

In reality, De Monitor found, only 55 percent of psychology graduates currently hold an academic-level job. Sixteen percent have an HBO-level job, whereas the remaining graduates are either unemployed (15 percent) or working at a lower or unknown level (14 percent). The authors of the student information website were found to have used the wrong indicator.

Also read

• Fewer good job opportunities for psychology students

Figures removed from website

It has now been established that the website not only made this mistake with regard to psychology students’ job prospects, but with regard to all university students’ job prospects, a Studiekeuze123 spokesperson confirmed. Therefore, the job prospect figures have been removed from the website’s information on all Bachelor’s degrees offered by Dutch universities.

For the time being, prospective students will have to scroll down in order to find the right information. If they do so, they will find which percentage of students actually found academic-level jobs and how long they had to wait before finding those jobs. Their starting salaries are also listed, as are their job prospects.

Website to be revised

The student information website is supposed to provide prospective students with hard facts which will help them choose a degree: How many first-year students do the various studies attract, how do they rate their studies, and how many drop out during their first year? And normally: how do they fare in the job market?

It will take a while for the website to be revised. We can’t do it any faster, Studiekeuze123’s spokesperson told us. “We’d rather take one or two weeks longer than present an inaccurate product.”