Changes in UCAS trends

[poetryandwine]

PSA: there is a freely accessible article in the Observer today about changes in degree preferences from 2019 to 2025. It is summarised from a study by Britton et al at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, New estimates of the impact of undergraduate degrees on lifetime earnings.

Projected lifetime financial return of the degree (vs expected earnings without a degree) is plotted against the percent change in the number of students doing a given degree. There are separate graphs for men and women.

Pharmacology has the biggest gain for each sex, with increased lifetime earnings of just over £100K. For men, Economics has a medium increase in numbers and the greatest lifetime earnings increase, about £460K. For women in Economics the increase in student numbers - from a very low base - is similar. But sexism in the field us shocking, and the earnings increase is under £300K. Shamefully, the Observer article cites the men’s figure as the overall one. I don’t think female numbers are so small as to make this accurate.

More women than men are moving into Medicine and women have their greatest earnings gain, £400K, here, though it is still a bit less than the men’s gain.

For men, the second highest increase in student numbers is for Nursing even though the lifetime earnings gain is small.

Languages have lost the most students and I am sorry to say that a Languages degree is associated with a small lifetime loss of earnings. So are degrees in the Creative and Performing Arts.

About 25% of students are thought to be worse off financially for doing a degree, according to this summary. That is shocking and worth bearing in mind.

I know children who graduated with good Oxbridge degrees who haven’t got jobs, whilst others who went to lower ranked institutions have managed blue chip careers. My dc are 25, 24 and 22, so this is recent.

What makes the difference are the extra-curriculars - experience during the degree, internships… anything that ticks boxes on the application form, basically. It’s also worth remembering that today, many jobs are based on blind applications, so good marks from an ex-poly may be better than lower marks at Oxford (although as the application form normally takes into account A level results, they’re not as blind as all that).

The child who’s done the best of my children’s friends went to UEA, so a reasonable non-RG.

I'd say it's about competition, not dilution. Some employers favour Oxbridge grads, others don't. An Oxbridge grad with an Eng Lit degree might be more employable than an Eng Lit grad from a less prestigious uni if all else is equal, but if the latter has some more interesting work or volunteering experience then the balance could easily tip the other way. It depends what the employer is looking for.

Yeah to be fair, you sound like you don't really know what you're talking about.

Please elaborate. I'm happy to be disagreed with constructively.

In this survey of 252 companies, 15% said they anonymised candidates' HE institution:
https://www.unialliance.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/University-Alliance-CBIE-Report_graduate-employability_To-What-Degree.pdf

@WilliamWilliamItWasReally That’s not true. Some Oxbridge degrees don’t have anywhere near 100.% employment stats. One big problem is that people don’t understand they need a much more developed cv to get a job. Then the degree you have is less important if you are doing history, English, MFLs etc. These students have skills but they need the work and volunteering too.

The lifetime earnings are a premium above non grad earnings. These have been closing for years. The research also shows that Doctors still do best in this competition but MN never agrees with that! When compared to law grads with 20% going on to get qualified, doctors are still nearly 100%.This incredible careee employment rate keeps lifetime earnings high. Even when they all go part time at 50.

I’ve been banging on about ifs reports for ages. They do often have a great deal of merit. The dilemma is that some dc just don’t like sciences and they are at risk of much poorer earnings now. This will drive student numbers down. It’s also important that we don’t have just scientists deciding the future for us. All work places need a variety of brains!

The unemployment rate for all graduates is increasing.

I take your point about extracurriculars and such. IME students who make the most of their university years, in line with their own talents and personalities, tend to have the best outcomes. The particulars can vary but the common theme is showing initiative.

Also IME (or rather that of students I have watched go through the process) blind applications tend to be rather demanding. There are often simulated tasks, timed tests, etc as well as rounds of interviews. I think it is great that a UEA or Leeds Met graduate is on equal footing with someone from Oxbridge. But in certain Civil Service departments at least, blind recruiting actually increased the percentage of Oxbridge recruits - and not because they snuck comments about rowing and May balls into their CVs. The thinking is that all those tutorials helped with the process I have just described.

It is not necessarily the tutorials that make the difference. It could be that Oxbridge is very selective in their intake.

It’s also important that we don’t have just scientists deciding the future for us.

Whilst I do agree with this, I wish we had a lot more scientists deciding the future for us now in politics and an awful lot less PPE and humanities graduates.

How did Margaret Thatcher's Chemistry degree help her more than a PPE or Humanities degree would have?

Or do you just mean you'd prefer more of a balance? (which I would agree with)

Indeed they are very selective, but the admissions process is acknowledged to be imperfect and, past a point, somewhat random. There is nothing like huge amounts of personal criticism (for those who can take it onboard and use it) and other feedback to promote learning.

This is a great question, and I know you didn’t direct it to me. I hope there will be lots of answers.

As someone in STEM I think we need many disciplines represented at all levels of government.

Dd has two friends with mfl degrees (admittedly Cambridge) who are doing really well in the foreign office one of them / security services the other aka won’t tell her what he does except he lives in Cheltenham and regularly drops off the radar for extended periods. Languages need to be the right one too, DD’s friends did Chinese and Arabic respectively

At the time, it probably gave her very useful experience of asserting herself in male dominated environments.

As Education and Science Secretary (1970–74) she dealt with science policy.

Her governments had to deal with nuclear policy, acid rain, climate change, AIDS and human-embryo research. A Royal Society biographical memoir specifically identifies these as areas in which scientific advice was important to her government.

True. Although of course she was in an all-female college. And I imagine every Oxford course was male-dominated at that time.

She also worked as an industrial chemist for 4 years.

I mean balance, but yes I do think having spent some time working in industry and learning scientific principles did a lot to help her. It is about dealing with reality and fixed rules as opposed to theory, ideals and supposition. I think too many of today’s politicians are too divorced from reality of life outside their bubbles.

Completely agree with this. Can't see it changing without, say, a higher minimum age for MPs

In Margaret Thatcher's 1988 Royal Society speech, she explicitly connected fossil-fuel use and deforestation with rising atmospheric CO₂. She described humanity as having possibly begun a “massive experiment” with the Earth's atmospheric system and warned that increased greenhouse gases could produce climatic instability.

She established Britain's Hadley Centre for climate research in 1990, which became one of the world's leading climate-research institutions,

Whereas we now have Labour who seem to think CO2 emissions don’t count if they are not produced in the UK so buying gas from Norway is ok but drilling our own is not.

A bit off topic as it’s not about jobs vs degree subjects, but there’s an article in today’s Times with the salaries of a random selection of Londoners. I think it shows how unpredictable earnings can turn out to be and how unexpected the salary differentials are between many jobs. Sorry I don’t know how to do a share link / archive.

I do think all the surveys discussed above are quite fragile in terms of reliability because they are both backward-looking (based on how salaries have evolved in the past) and forwarding-looking (based on a lot of assumptions) - over a 40 year career, they’re probably no more reliable than a crystal ball. In 5 years time we may all be on UBI!

We asked 43 Londoners what they earn — and whether they’re worth it

www.thetimes.com/article/71af3f40-b6c0-42c8-86d4-ee8692d729fe?shareToken=a852c136f377561ff1154a77a977ae77

I haven't found any data to back this, but my own observation from my DCs cohorts is that (first class) STEM graduates who want to do law have some advantage over non-STEM grads because, as well as applying for training contracts requiring 'any degree' they can apply to the many law firms with STEM-specific recruitment initiatives.

There are areas of commercial law where technical/scientific knowledge is particularly useful:
intellectual property/patents
life sciences
pharmaceuticals
technology
AI/data
engineering
telecoms
energy
cybersecurity
certain regulatory practices.

Interesting you say males doing nursing degrees has increased. My DS has just started a T level in Health with an adult nursing specialism and he is the only boy out of over 60 students taking it at his college.

That is interesting. Anecdotally, whenever I have visited someone in hospital the last few years, there have been a reasonable number of male nurses on the wards.

What is this experience like for your DS?

Yes I always seem to encounter quite a few male nurses as well but othe people tell me there aren't very many so maybe the ones I've seen aren't exactly nurses, it's hard to tell with their uniforms these days. His experience is 3 days only so not much feedback so far.

I think the research is interesting but the lifetime ones by their nature are historical and people in their late 40s now. Plus the figures given are medians, if they were to look at top say 10% or 25% you would see quite different rankings between some subjects I suspect. Degrees which lead to a lot of public sector employment may have raised medians but lower means relative to degrees which mainly lead to private sector jobs or at least less of a range of salaries.

If you look at this for example you see medicine is top for the median average salary but much lower down the rankings when you look at top salaries. Also I think medicine has been affected by the pay limits on the public sector like the civil service has and you can see the effect in the IFS original paper when it shows 2011 figures and we are now 15 years on. There's also a cap on medicine students which creates a barrier to entry whereas other subjects are as many as universities chose to create. Though choosing now its the next 40 years that matters.

https://campusquant.com/uk/subjects/