Finance Choices
Is it worth going to university?
A new report has found that a degree can add just £22,458 to a graduate's lifetime earnings, meaning the cost of education could see them lose money by going to university.
With a doubling of the number of graduates in the last 15 years, the value-to-earnings rate of a degree is falling, research from the University of Swansea has found.
While the last estimate of the value of a degree to lifetime earnings stood at £400,000 - the new report by Nigel O'Leary and Peter Sloane puts the average return on a degree at just under £150,000 - with a male arts graduate likely to add just £22,458 to their career earnings.
What is more, the authors of the report found that this figure is likely to fall further.
The report comes ahead of next year's introduction of university top up fees by the Government - which used the old £400,000 income boost estimate as part of their argument to set the top-up limit at £3,000 a year.
However, some subjects provide a far greater boost to lifetime earnings than others. While male graduates with arts degrees (including English and theology) add the least to lifetime earnings, maths or computing degrees gave the greatest boost - adding £222,419 for men and £227,939 for women.
The report, The Changing Wage Return to an Undergraduate Education, was compiled using British Labour Survey's findings from 1993 to 2003.
Dr O'Leary explained that while the demand for graduates has increased, it has been outstripped by supply.
"As the number of graduates competing for jobs increases, the earnings premiums they are getting are being bid down," he said.
"Students can still expect substantial returns on their investment. But it certainly does depend on what subjects they do. Those in arts-based disciplines are not getting anywhere near those rates of return."
With a doubling of the number of graduates in the last 15 years, the value-to-earnings rate of a degree is falling, research from the University of Swansea has found.
While the last estimate of the value of a degree to lifetime earnings stood at £400,000 - the new report by Nigel O'Leary and Peter Sloane puts the average return on a degree at just under £150,000 - with a male arts graduate likely to add just £22,458 to their career earnings.
What is more, the authors of the report found that this figure is likely to fall further.
The report comes ahead of next year's introduction of university top up fees by the Government - which used the old £400,000 income boost estimate as part of their argument to set the top-up limit at £3,000 a year.
However, some subjects provide a far greater boost to lifetime earnings than others. While male graduates with arts degrees (including English and theology) add the least to lifetime earnings, maths or computing degrees gave the greatest boost - adding £222,419 for men and £227,939 for women.
The report, The Changing Wage Return to an Undergraduate Education, was compiled using British Labour Survey's findings from 1993 to 2003.
Dr O'Leary explained that while the demand for graduates has increased, it has been outstripped by supply.
"As the number of graduates competing for jobs increases, the earnings premiums they are getting are being bid down," he said.
"Students can still expect substantial returns on their investment. But it certainly does depend on what subjects they do. Those in arts-based disciplines are not getting anywhere near those rates of return."
posted by Bruce Wayne at 7:07 AM
Is it worth going to university?
7 Comments:
It is worth it (IMO).
Even if you don't use the stuff you learn in classes, you will learn a lot about life at Uni (particularly if you go straight from school), as well as having some fun and meeting people.
You also learn a lot of stuff you wouldn't have done if left to your own devices. For example in web design you would learn about web standards and practice, which is an area most people would otherwise neglect.
Education is what you make of it. You know the old adage - you can lead a horse to water....
If you go to Uni and piss around, don't go to lectures, don't study, don't put any effort in - then it's a complete waste of time and probably will mean you have gained a tonne of debt in the process.
The problem is that so many universities offer such poor standard degrees now that the value of a degree has dropped hugely but the cost of one has risen.
The governments rhetoric about university education being so vital for a successful life is going to land alot of students with huge debt and little additional career prospects!
I think one problem might be simply too many people wanting to go to uni without the usual qualifications.
For example, maybe 20 years ago about the top academic 10% of the population went to uni so you needed reasonably good A levels to get in.
These days they accept so many people that they need to lower the level of the work to allow them to get through it all.
There was something on the TV a while back with industry bosses saying the people they get from Uni are often so undertrained now that they may as well just come in at 18 and do an apprenticeship as at least then they'd be properly trained.
On the up side you get the social life and the student loans enable you to get a mortage more easily, but is it really worth it? I'm not too convinced...
Trev
Two points or ideas:
1. Screw the 20,000 dollars or whatever (could be much, much more.)
2. If you say from your expereince university worth it, without fooling yourself or being disgenuine, you may be one of the luckiest persons on earth. I believe that there are many who fool themselves in this respect or pretend to others they are fooling themselves. Both of these sentences from point 2 are pure conjecture.
The notion I relate in point 1 I have experienced fully and that is the subject of this comment.I'll continue it:
But "university" can ruin your life, screw it up completely and beyond what you'd ever imagined and could ever consider yourself possible of imagining. I reckon that it can maim and painfully damage your spiritual existence for eternities if more than one can exist.
Check this out:
http:webspawner.com/users/newone042/index.html
I went to the worst university in the world and one of the worst so-called "universites" imaginable.
Most often it is described as one of the best. It was described as this when I went and no-one commented about the reality in the press. The big newpaper figures and government university figures said the best. I was just wise enough back then to guess before going and in very early stages of being at a study institution that these could be wholly wrong, as with any exercise, but I couldn't ever believe that it would stay this way. It is some huge wrong. Not only is it the opposite, but the totality of what is beyond the opposite.
For example, The Guardian national newspaper had the course I attended within a group containing I believe only one other course at the institution, second only to Cambridge University and one above Oxford University. Last year the same newspaper had the same course, probably totally unchanged (from what I can see of the website it seems hardly changed) at their number 37, one below The University of East London, which I had never heard of before this. In vogue these days is the popularising of the various universities which make up, apparently London university. I wish someone could explain this. But I think that that is all that the tables producers are doing in recent years. Soliciting this question. It is very strange.If at the top, surely, surely, surely they know what the name of the type of their institution is and are able to define it. Perhaps it is just something big. Or something else.I am joking.
But, putting aside elephant species terms in London (not funny, really), this course I mention could not in any fathomable circumstances have got any worse in the meantime. It is not possible. It simply is not credibly possible. At all.
What the hell is at number two this year and are there any humans reading it? No one is complaining, or very few are. I have found a number of comments which break through the silence agreement, or occurence, though even they retain some kind of extra code in communicating the reality.
What I mean by beyond the opposite is that not only was the course probably second to the very worst university course ever (there hand shaking is being done with, most likely, at least one strangely recent and naturally dismemebered limb with no reactions or false reactions), but that leaving aside the existence of the Beelzebub creature, there is nothing imaginable which could be worse.
Perhaps this is all just an illustration of dire and keenly and in large swathes solely diabolicial British culture which experiences everything as a joke and just a kind symbolic gesture towards real life. In modern times anyway, I have not been here before. Students at the institution told me this (I do not come from the island of Great Britain). They said "it" is appalling. But Great Britain is much, much worse than what "it" might be. And they went on and on about it. And they were seethingly jealous. And said so. And I had no idea at the time what they were talking about. I was brainwashed.
The figures in my country are beyond totally, totally, totally mad. The very existence of this one university at least is in a position and situation much, much worse than this.
I have just come across an article about a sacked lecturer from this institution, a whole fuss over nothing, though the rule of mob culture in the institution, the students who take and conform to a prescribed existence of excrement to show those in power, often anyone in establishment aside as well, what they ought categorically to be doing in such circumstances. But, free speech aside, if the head doesn't sack the one who rouses the stupid, accepting oinks who sweat over a couple of words, those of a ten year old, each year, then where on earth will his dinner come from, not to mention cheese and wine dos at the local National Portrait Gallery branch?
It is symbolic, though this onylr truly in a different sense as there is nothing real there. It is a gesture, something seen or remebered of the real world.
Basically the place IS animal farm. The students somehow decide that all that is appropriate is that they are the pigs. And they are sick and evil, and preside over those who ramble a couple of worsds annually from the dictionary.
But why I mention this episode is that the web reference is nearly the only place which commented on the apparent trends towards reality of the tables, before the recent back-to-bonkers trend:
"censorious Edinburgh University's decline (e.g. Sunday Times: Edinburgh's 2003 fall to 18th among UK universities)"
http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/
Nearly everyone else shushed until, unbelievably it popped back up again, more than earthly credibly, The Times popping it in to their brand new world top 50 (no other impetus than a quick, relaxed Barry Norman impression), undoubtably symbolically for readers to ask with china in hand, but where are the other 10 or so British universities which the same paper had published in the national tables as being over this great-world-opposite-wink thing.
And now The Times figures this year are stark bonkers again, like 13 years ago (the year after the student film society last showed "The China Syndrome") . Simply, don't believe it. "The Omen" forecasts are truly happening in Great Britain. What poor "bastards" (or "bastard") who have been shielded from what legions of apparent humans apparently somehow know about beforehand are the target this time?
Madness is going beyond and people who haven't been there yet, and otheres in complete other worldly possession, scores of them are calling this place "Scotland's best university", "one of the very best British universities".
There was never such a campaign before. The trap used to be so, so, so much more subtle. It was the most subtle ever, in fact, beyond that of all novels or films. Pure genius. Where? The east coast of Scotland. Roll out the barrels, on the mainland, but it's not what you think.
This is something new, but it is not something.
I could say that yes, in the face of this, it is galling having debts amounting to the values of tens and tens of thousands of dollars, or hundreds of dollars, where the learning you receive, here considering somewhere other than the institution reffered to so far, is not as good, or not comparable, as to what you would do at home yourself if you had a personal small and private study available daily and were to make use of it.
But at the institution I have mentioned, having debts of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds afterwards is simply meaningless relatively and this rough kick in the teeth equation incomparable to the real situation. The money simply isn't a concern, if even left bereft of any funds.
Read this website link.
I can be contacted. Details are on the website.
Here is an additional comment from the author of the long comment above.
In the above comment I express the feeling that I was "brainwashed". This is truly expressed although the word is to be taken as meant in the sense of the personal experience or condition, and, explicity, not meant here, whatever may be written elsewhere, to suggest that any person or company has been actually brainwashing people, or me. Certainly not. I'm afraid I don't have the medical or other relevant knowledge to say in analysis that anyone in any event has actually behaved in such a manner. I haven't even looked up the meaning of the word in the dictionary. So it is used without active verbal meaning as from a subject. The term is used to describe only the personal reality, and although this was completely a direct result of attending the institution written about, I am not claiming that these people are active brainwashers. God, no. I don't even know what it might entail to be ONLY a brainwasher or nearly this. I haven't even given the name of the institution here, so I am being oversafe. I can't be bothered stepping on peoples toes. The use of this word was confusing and is I hope cleared up here. I don't want people jumping to conclusions which are from what is written searingly obvious though where a single word is actually used only to indicate a "result" or condition. Here I feel I have to indicate that an unexpected lexical occurence is present, the usual active part which is perhaps associated with this word isn't implied, explicity, with reference to this word, "brainwashed". Hence, I should say, I don't know, perhaps my use of the word is incorrect. I hope that the two communication points are clear, though. That the personal conditions I describe are a direct result, only, of my going to this study institution, and that I am certainly not claiming however, I simply amn't doing this,
that this institution had brainwashed me. Although I maintain that, personally, I was as brainwashed.
Funnily, this opinion expressed as having some financial relevance, and I say the points made by others about student debts with bad poor education are to be taken very seriously if I belittled these, my saying that bad experiences may be beyond the financial burden alone and render this meaningless is now, I suppose, conditioned. I certainly can't afford to spend money if someone gets miffed enough to take action by a word used in the comment above. I hope all is explained now.
Some of the most creative people in the world have been college drop outs or never been to college. I don't believe in the necessity of going to college if you have something going on for yourself already. If someone is undecided and needs some time to make up his/her mind, college is a good thing to attend and learn something while deciding
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