It’s not a bad survey if what you’re after is an idea of what some of the big, London-based blue-chip employers are thinking of paying new recruits, but your delving into dangerous territory if you want to use it to compare salaries year-on-year. The press release does it, of course, because that’s what the media want to print.

The survey is also notoriously bad at the public sector, the arts, the media, science, IT and engineering salaries, because it doesn’t sample many employers from those fields.

The much more representative Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education Survey, which samples *all* graduates from UK universities (you’ll have got the form in January if you left last year - hope you filled it in!) was also out this week, but went largely *unreported* - because the results were a bit boring - graduate unemployment unchanged (and quite low), median salaries have gone up a little bit but not much, HE sector not in turmoil or meltdown. Haven’t got the full results yet but I’d imagine average graduate starting salaries will be a little bit north of what they were in 2006 (which was around £17.5k) - probably pushing £18k.

Sorry for the length of the post, but it’s worth explaining what’s really going on because so few people actually get to find out.

It’s very simple. The AGR survey doesn’t actually measure graduate salaries. It looks at what a small sample of high-paying graduate employers either have paid, or expect to pay their new graduates. It depends very heavily on which employers of their sample expect to be recruiting a lot of people in a particular year, amongst other things.