As a follow up on that 100 k earnings number see this article. The highlight numbers are below but clearly if you are going to acquire around 25 k of debt and you study the arts you will on average only make an additional 15 k. Clearly you also need to realise that some people who study arts will go on to be famous artists/designers/etc and make a lot more than this while others will clearly never make back the money they spent on university. Averages are misleading, you need to see the distributions and know what the variances are. You can also see that this article clearly refutes the spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills who claimed that you can expect to earn at least 100,000 pounds more. Not true if you study Languages, Humanities or Arts. Again he’s probably lifted the average graduate number of 160,061. This in its self is highly skewed by all those medics who earn so much.
What depresses me most about this is that the BBC journalists are competent enough to dig back through their own reports and consider questioning what they are being told. Firstly is the 25k number really valid? Secondly why let the government get away with talking such utter rubbish. Is it because the press don’t do investigations/challenging anymore or is it simply because they simply relay the press releases to the public or is there some cynical love in with the new government?
Degree Earnings Premium
Medicine: £340,315
Engineering: £243,730
Maths: £241,749
Business: £184,694
Average graduate: £160,061
Languages: £96,281
Humanities: £51,549
Arts: £34,494
