The value of a UK university degree
The value depends enormously on what you study, where, and who you are, and the data now makes that obvious. Graduates in 2024 earned a median salary of £42,000 compared to £30,500 for non-graduates, which sounds reassuring until you factor in the three-year opportunity cost, the debt, and the inflation-adjusted trend. The graduate pay premium over minimum-wage salaries has been cut in half since 2007, and in real terms the average graduate salary is now around 30% lower than it was fifteen years ago.
The IFS, to its credit, has recently tried to cut through to the real, as opposed to perceived, value. Their research accounts for GCSE grades and family background, comparing graduates with similar peers who did not attend, a much more honest measure than the raw headline premium. Even so, the IFS concedes that even among those who graduated twenty years ago, about one in five would have been better off financially had they not gone to university.
The critical variable is subject. Medicine and dentistry graduates start around £35,000. Engineering and technology around £31,000. Media, journalism and communications closer to £24,000. And creative arts often between £18,000 and £25,000. The argument that any degree from any university is a sound investment has quietly collapsed because the marginal graduate premium, for those at the lower end of academic attainment entering lower-return courses, has arguably been negative for two decades.
Some regard university as a three-year holiday camp, though it varies wildly by course and institution. Law, medicine, engineering and the hard sciences remain genuinely demanding, and students in these fields are worked hard and graduate with something demonstrably useful. But across swathes of the social sciences and humanities, the contact hours are notably low, often eight to twelve per week, grade inflation has been rampant (the proportion of firsts and upper seconds has exploded over two decades), and the social function of university has come to rival and sometimes dominate the academic one.
The idea of university as a transition to adult life contains a real sociological truth. For many students, university is a moratorium, a three-year deferral of the question of what one is actually going to do, conducted at public or parental expense or by debt. This is not entirely without value because networks are built, characters are formed, and citizens emerge. But it is expensive therapy for adulthood, and the honest case for it should be made on those grounds rather than disguised as a guaranteed financial return.
Whether grievance studies are worth doing is a question that admits the most direct answer. Almost certainly they are not. Gender studies, postcolonial studies, critical race theory as a discipline, and their various offshoots offer poor employment prospects, are intellectually narrow (they tend to begin from conclusions and work backwards), and are designed less to train minds than to confirm worldviews.
The humanities and social sciences at their best involve rigorous history, analytical philosophy, serious sociology, and real economics, and develop transferable skills in reasoning, evidence and argument. The grievance disciplines, by contrast, have progressively substituted political commitment for intellectual method.
The market has noticed. Employers looking for analytical ability find it poorly signalled by a degree in Women's and Non-Binary Studies; and the government has begun, belatedly, to share that view. Legislation is being outlined to limit the growth of courses that deliver consistently poor returns, with the Skills Minister noting that too many courses are ‘selling the dream then leaving students in the lurch.’
The rule of thumb is fairly simple. A degree in a field with genuine intellectual content and demonstrable market demand, including medicine, law, engineering, computer science, mathematics, economics or rigorous liberal arts at a serious institution, remains a sound investment. A degree in a field organised around grievance, whose primary output is a disposition rather than a skill, is an expensive way to acquire views you already held at eighteen.
Madsen Pirie