• Support for outcome transparency seems likely to be the best way to manage consumer confidence, recruitment and media coverage.
• There is time to embed professional and personal development in the curriculum before next year, and to outline this in the standard reply to prospective students' Outcome Enquiries. Universities' careers services may be very keen to collaborate.
• Most subjects offer a range of graduates benefits beyond paid employment.
• Greater transparency will offer marketing opportunities to similar courses at other institutions.

You could collaborate with your academic colleagues and your university's career service to develop curriculum-based professional development, so that delivery and assessment doesn't displace academic material or consume additional time.

When HEIs withhold information that students need to decide how to manage their employability, then responsibility for managing students' employability moves from the students to the HEIs.

The market has changed. Rising costs increasingly focus students' minds on the economics of higher education. Students need accurate employment outcome information as an indicator of the likely performance of their investment.

Outcome Enquiry Cards are available to prospective students intending to study any subject at any UK HEI.

• Some prospective students may also not be interested in employment...
• ... however as their student colleagues discuss their career plans towards the end of the course, many students who were initially motivated by their interest in the subject discover ambitions to express their new-found capability in paid employment.

• The range of first destination employment demonstrates that some graduates from every discipline achieve sufficient professional development to enter rewarding, graduate-level employment.
• All undergraduate courses can support professional and personal development, and career management activities.

• This is often true, however with the benefit of hindsight most graduates wish they had known better. Many undergraduates are to some extent institutionalised, and struggle to anticipate the experience of transitions from education to employment, and from dependence to structuring their own opportunities.
• Formal academic assessment encourages students to engage with their professional development and career management.

• Accepting a low-paid unskilled job is seldom part of a well-formed strategy for paying off debts.
• Graduates from degrees that do not prepare students to access graduate job opportunities accept low skilled jobs, unable to compete for rewarding work that would pay off their debts more quickly.

Versatile, confident graduates' gap year adventures are more likely to be an asset to your course's destination data than the naive wanderings of gap year tourists - although even these may attract certain prospective students.

Students study degrees for many reasons. Most want to become more capable, and towards the end of their courses increasingly seek an opportunity to demonstrate their capability in some professional field. They expect a reward for the contribution that they make, and most often find themselves receiving a salary determined by their ability to add value through their work, and by their capacity to manage their careers.

You could offer destinations of graduates from similar courses at your university.

• As part of the First Destinations and Destinations of Leavers from HE Surveys, each HEI explains to its graduates the purposes for which it is collecting the data. Some HEIs are able to make detailed FDS / DLHE data available to the public.
• It is possible to improve anonymity by providing separate alphabetic lists of occupations, employers and locations, and a ranked salary list, all containing duplicate information once only.
• It is common practice to release less detailed FDS / DLHE data for very small graduate cohorts.
• Students may be less attracted to HEIs that disclose less detailed graduate first destinations.
• See the Responding to Outcome Enquiries pages of this site

• Have another look at the opportunities.
• It's the current situation that's unsafe.