The latest data on graduate earnings is out, and the message from the market is clear: if you want to fill your pockets, forget the humanities and head for the lab. Medicine, economics, and engineering top the list of highest-earning degrees, with median salaries pushing past £40,000 within five years of graduation. Meanwhile, the arts and humanities languish below £30,000.
This is not a revelation. It is a brutal confirmation of supply and demand in a constrained labour market. And yet, the annual hand-wringing over ‘skills gaps’ and ‘STEM shortages’ suggests we have learned nothing.
Government ministers, ever eager to meddle, will no doubt use this data to push more students into science and technology. But let us be honest: the market already does that. The real problem is the quality of those degrees and the fiscal incontinence of the state that funds them.
Tuition fees have created a perverse incentive for universities to churn out degrees with little regard for employability. The result? A generation burdened with debt and a degree in media studies that is about as useful as a chocolate teapot in a recession.
The solution is not more government targets. It is letting the market work. If students are rational actors, they will gravitate towards high-earning degrees anyway.
The state should stop subsidising courses with poor returns. And perhaps, just perhaps, we should stop pretending that all degrees are equal. They are not.
And the data, as always, tells the ugly truth.
