ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Higher Education (HE) participation trends in Europe and discusses the knowledge-economy thesis basis of the government and EU policies that promoted increased HE participation and widening access to HE. It concentrates on the UK graduate labour market. The chapter provides a clearer indication of the extent and distribution of graduate unemployment and under-employment, and the variables associated with more or less successful graduate labour market integration. It considers the extent to which recent UK HE expansion has reduced or reinforced socio-economic inequalities, it was shown that access to higher education is not automatically linked to upward social mobility. The Futuretrack findings revealed that those students who had extra-curricular or office-holder experiences in HE were more likely than others to be in a graduate job, which is indicative of the added-value of having been able to take advantage of the wider advantages of HE participation in these.
