Anyone go to Oxbridge but not earn very much?

[OhFreedom]

I just went to a careers evening with DC at the local 6th form college he goes to. It included a talk about Oxbridge, and it mentioned the high earning potential for Oxbridge degrees. It just made me think (and - to be honest - wonder about the choices I'd made)....

I went to Oxbridge, and did a degree in a highly competitive subject. Then - being young and idealistic - I went and did an interesting (and I thought morally-driven) job, which is not very high paid. It's not bad pay (about £50k fte)- I'm not complaining - but not exactly high. I also married a low earner, and it literally never crossed my mind to think about this aspect of him when I fell for him, all those years ago. We're still very happy together (after 25 years), but often don't have much spare cash, especially these days.

Now that I think about it, almost all the people I know from uni are high earners (or at least higher than I am!).

Is it bad that - just for this evening - I feel like I really missed a trick?

Not me, but a good friend from school went to Oxford and did geography. She’s a primary school teacher now. Perfectly happy, but definitely not a high earner.

My friends have all done well in that they seem happy, settled and enjoy their lives. Salaries vary greatly.

I think maybe the most intelligent people perhaps realise the most important thing in life isn’t about earning loadsamoney. Maybe that’s why you aren’t on a massive wage OP!
I always think it’s odd, on the university threads, to see all these supposedly bright young people choosing medicine as a career…

I'd love to have been a psychologist. Interesting it's on here.

I'm more like a library assistant 😬.

🙋🏻‍♀️

I’m a teacher.

I have two senior clinical psychologist friends. Both have very difficult jobs — high stress levels, lots of management politicking, research, but also challenging clinical work. One, for instance, specialises in working with terminally ill children.

Me

A handful of my contemporaries are very high earning high flyers. The vast majority are librarians, teachers, vicars, charity workers etc. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground. One of my friends gave up a promising career as a barrister to run a donkey sanctuary.

Omg, you could be me! I also went to a Big 4 firm, hated it, went to work in the arts for 18 years, and now in HE . It's reasonably well paid (above average wage) but not megabucks. DH (also Oxbridge) earns more than me but not six figures. We're both in the kind of public sector techy/specialist jobs that value knowledge and skills but don't pay as much as the private sector. We both went to state schools, if that makes any difference.

I don't think any of my friends from university are stinking rich, either, although they all have well-paid professional jobs. (Not well paid in Mumsnet terms, obviously , but above the median UK wage of £34k.)

You could go to Oxbridge, becone a lawyer in London and earn megabucks. You could go to Oxbridge, get a career in the creative arts/humanities and barely afford a mortgage. It's the career you choose more than the uni you go to.

I and three friends with Oxbridge degrees all ended up on benefits for most of our adult lives, due to various traumatic events and/or being single parents with pnd.

Another was homeless for a while and did various jobs before becoming a programmer and earning quite well.

I didn't go to university for earnings, though, but to learn. Admittedly, that was back when degrees were free and you could get a high 2.1 from Oxford or Cambridge being stoned for three years and the world was looking more optimistic a place!

DP. He's a (classical) musician after being a choral scholar there.

He seriously considered becoming an actuary though. Completely opposite ends of the salary spectrum!

I felt similar.

In my case, I found it really demotivating and depressing because there were so many misogynistic tutors who didn't want somen there, so many students who weren't very intelligent (just had easy childhoods and went to public schools) and were only there to get jobs in the City — a very anti-intellectual atmosphere, where even tutors positively discouraged any love of the subject or intellectual discussion.

I graduated very depressed and burnt out. Went to another university for post-grad; then life stuff happened and my career came to a standstill.

OP didn’t specify “megabucks” though. Just over 50k.

I don't think it's about family money or connections, or even social class, but I do think that family background and the expectations you grow up with have a lot to do with it.

I felt disappointed and almost ashamed of myself for many years for not having made better use of my Oxbridge degree. Eventually it occurred to me that I was the first one in my extended family on both sides to have been educated beyond the age of 14. I simply had no idea what an education meant, the choices it could give me or the doors it might open.

@juniorspesh What's a post '92 uni please?

Yep. My oxbridge peers range from ambassadors and PMs/ Tory bankers to my mates who mostly went into public sector work. Don't think anyone actually talked about pay, we just thought companies were generally evil. I don't associate Oxbridge degrees generally with high pay but I do associate Tories from a business world with public schools/oxbridge.

We didn’t stay in touch with many at all. The ones we did were both teachers, though one went into quite a specialist area later. I don’t know their wage - not megabucks but managing with neither luxuries nor hardship.

DH has burned out in the past and taken pay cuts, on 70k now close to retirement. I burnt out in idealistic careers. Would never have paid back my student loan, but did it from savings to avoid it building up 🤣.

Both able to cut the noses off our own faces on matters of principle.

There are more guaranteed ways for a clever kid to get megabucks than oxbridge.

One friend when to Oxford. Studied law. Civil servant (HEO) at 30. Earning about £37K in London and over eight years now out of uni.

Another friend went to UAE and is an investment banker. Just bought a house outright in Sevenoaks…cost about £1.5m

Ultimately, it’s about drive and luck more than it is about the university.

There's high earning potential because many Oxbridge graduates are private schoolers whose Daddy will get them a job in finance. Their degree is irrelevant. Degrees are pretty irrelevant nowadays, my career success has all been about hard work and getting experience.

Not oxbridge, but I was also sold the lie that go to university, get a degree, earn £££££ more than those without. STEM even more so.

i even went on to get a PhD.

worked in the field for a while, realised the pay and working grant to grant was shit, and moved to the nhs where at least it was permanent any the pay much better- that’s how bad academia was.

i’m now 50’s and working in a completely unrelated field. Most my age are multiple steps ahead on the ladder and earning triple my salary as they got their careers going while I was at uni.

I’m also 8 years behind on my pension from the time I spent at uni, and am seeing colleagues the same age all retiring on final salary pensions at 55 after joining at 18 or so. While I missed the final salary boat and am contribution based. So will be retiring at 68.

Sorry to hear that it didn't work out for you. Can you give some examples of the non-graduate careers that your contemporaries have gone into?

Me me me!

I did climb onto the career ladder after I left Oxford, and was on good money (FMCG - supply chain) until I took a career break to have 3DCs. After that, I didn't really want to climb back on, so have been working for a local company on pretty average pay for the last 16 years. It suits me down to the ground - nice people, great work-life balance, meaning I could do the school runs, afterschool etc, then I ramped up my hours to FT once the DCs were at secondary school.

I do get pangs of regret sometimes, when I look at what others have made of their careers - did I waste my potential? I still don't earn as much as I did in my late 20s. I used to earn double what DH earned, now it's the other way round (and he didn't even go to university).

But amongst my Oxford contemporaries there is a real mixture of jobs, some well paid, some decidedly average. Publishing, HR, Barrister, Journalist, Teacher, Chancellor of the Exchequer....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-1992_university