I saw this morning that the University of Teesside is trumpeting on the Guardian’s website that its degree is worth, on average, £117,000.
A click on the ad reveals that Teesside is talking about a postgraduate degree being worth £117,300 extra in lifetime earnings. But I couldn’t find a source for the info, nor any indication of what Teesside was comparing its postgrad degree with.
Last week, the Higher Education Statistics Agency announced a drop of two percentage points in the employment rate of 2008’s graduates, compared with the previous year. And the media are filled with gloomy forecasts for the job chances for the class of 2009 and beyond. Perhaps recession-hit graduate premium figures will need to be revisited, particularly as universities gear up for the review of top-up fees.
Not that long ago, the government was saying that people with a higher education qualification earned around 50% more than non-graduates (see its 2003 white paper, The future of higher education). At the time, when it was campaigning to get top-up fees introduced, Labour said the graduate premium was worth an extra £400,000 in lifetime earnings. It turned out that the comparator was average earnings. That figure fell rapidly when a more realistic comparator was found.
Two years ago, Universities UK said the graduate premium amounted to an additional £160,000 over a working lifetime compared with an individual with two or more A-levels. This represents a difference of up to 25% between the two groups.
But the differences are more fine-grained than that. UUK said the lifetime earnings premium was £340,000 for medicine and dentistry qualifications, compared with £51,549 for the humanities and £34,949 for the arts. Note that the report did not look into the sensitive subject of institutional differences – territory that Teesside is not afraid to plunge into.
Maybe in making the case for higher education, we need to take a leaf from the book of this blogger, writing in January 2003 in response to the question ‘Was your degree worth £21k?’ – ‘How much was it worth? It's beyond price and it's not a financial thing’. The commentator? One Boris Johnson, then MP and editor of the Spectator.
