The bar charts illustrate what postgraduate and undergraduate students in the UK did instead of going into full-time work after graduating in 2008.
Overall, the most popular option among graduates and postgraduates was further study, while the least popular option was to do voluntary work. Another noticeable feature is that the number of graduates in each category was significantly higher than that of postgraduates.
Further study was the most common choice between both graduates and postgraduates. However, considerably more graduate students chose further study, comparing 29,665 graduate students to just 2,725 postgraduate students. While voluntary work was the least popular activity for both groups, with only 3,500 graduates and 345 postgraduates involved in voluntary work.
In terms of part-time work and unemployment, both categories were chosen by a large number of graduates. Around 17,735 graduates took part-time jobs, which was notably higher than the 2,535 postgraduates who selected it instead of going into full-time work. Moreover, the number of unemployed graduate students was 16,235, while only 1,625 postgraduates were without work, which is almost ten times lower than the number of graduates.