Profile-relevant employability of university graduates: social network data analysis

Russian educational policy in the recent years has been directed towards realization of institutional and infrastructure transformation of universities. This brought about governmental programmes aimed for development of leading Russian universities and for their competitive growth in the Russian and world markets. Russian universities began competing among themselves to achieve the key performance indicators (KPIs: publication activity, citation ratio, the share of income resulting from scientific activities in the university budget, the number of foreign students, the percentage of foreign teachers, the number of joint international educational programs etc.). It is quite obvious that science-related KPIs are generally more relevant and objective than education-related ones. Therefore, there appears the key question, whether the Russian universities are capable to fulfil their main mission - to provide highly skilled globally completive specialists, who would be able to work in conditions of the innovative knowledge-driven economy and all-world competition. The subject of our research is the profile relevance of employability of the graduates of the leading Russian universities - participants of Project 5-100. This KPI is not formally among the key indicators of Project 5-100, but believably belongs to the most important ones in evaluating the educational quality of any university. In this paper, we address this issue by using the new quantitative data from the biggest Russian social network «Vkontakte». By our research, we are bringing this new source of information to this research domain, and by doing so, we are getting access to data which are generated directly from the graduates themselves without any mediators or filters. On the basis of this information we conclude that more than 50 % of the Russian graduates are not employed according to their specialization after they leave university. This obviously reflects weak correlation between the content of their education and the demands of the employers, and also dissatisfaction of the latter with the quality of education provided by the universities. This means that even the leading Russian universities do not provide the necessary level of links with employers, despite the high demand for the skilled workforce at the labour market. According to the results of the analysis, we can state that the problem of non-educational employment of Russian university graduates concerns all areas of training and all regions of the country, and, therefore, is systemic in its nature. In general, the situation in the country looks approximately the same. There is a difference only in the effectiveness of employment between the various subject areas. The employed in the best way are graduates-physicians and IT-specialists, in the worst way - specialists in social and human sciences and jurisprudence. The novelty of the research is in the fact that the social network «Vkontakte» has never been used before to analyze this topic on the country-wide level. The research results appeared to be quite close in qualitative and quantitative sense to the previously studies, undertaken by the portal of Superjob.ru and by Petrozavodsk State University. Having addressed the same subject, but using different data, we came to comparable conclusions with them, but each time 5 years one after another (Superjob.ru - 2007, Petrozavodsk State University - 2012, ITMO University - 2017). The profile relevance of employability of the graduates of the leading Russian universities keeps being at the same level of 45-50 %. Our version is 46 %. Unfortunately, the visible progress in this area is still absent. The key conclusion of the study is the following: the Russian system of university graduate's employment is unbalanced and not effective. More than 50 % of graduates leave Russian universities «for nowhere». An integrated approach to the organization of labour force planning is required, in particular, to the development of foresights of specialists in the main areas of the future economy.