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.

Medians are a much better measure as the avoid the skewing caused by a very few very high incomes. Very often those very high incomes have little to do with degree subject and often reflect big success in personal entrepreneurship.

@OneZanyCat Yes but expansion in student numbers, eg law, means there are top earners but as a % of grads taking law, it’s tiny. Most grads from medicine get jobs and can work abroad. A law degree here might not qualify you to be any sort of lawyer abroad. It only partly qualifies here! However many students gamble that they will get qualified and then don’t.

Doctors have had massive pay rises. They will always earn more than most teachers or local government employees. Yes, the numbers on medical degrees are limited but so are highly paid legal jobs!

Very interesting. Biosciences have a fairly small return for both men and women. I used to tell people this on TSR and the inevitable outcry was "but it's STEM". Yes, but not all STEM degrees are equal.

Interesting that Physics has quite small returns for women, but big returns for men... Do female physicists go into teaching?

@SoftIce And environmental science too. The harder sciences pay better and engineering - these people have the solutions to the issues discovered by the Env Scientists.

Women in Physics, CS and a couple of the Engineering specialisms are victims of a terrible gender gap, worse than Maths, Chemistry and much worse than Life Sciences, in academia.

In Physics particularly, it is well documented that women lose out to men in the competition for lab space, expensive equipment and start up funds. Women also suffer notably on the metrics I mentioned in my post on sexism in Economics.

The sexism in all these fields is rational in that the under-representation of women in the higher academic ranks correlates with fewer grants, esteems, etc. In Physics particularly, there has been a lot of work showing that the sexism begins before the lack of results: the Institute of Physics has some very good research on this. However even a small amount of sexism -say, for lab space or equipment - has big impacts when the competition is intense.

One big success story occurred between 1994-1999 st MIT of all places. In 1994 there were only 16 female Professors of scientific disciplines in the whole Institute. They began talking about their working lives and realised that even though they were more esteemed externally than their male peers, they too suffered internally from smaller labs, worse equipment, higher teaching and service demands, etc.

The brilliant thing is that when they presented this to the Dean of the Science Faculty, he took them seriously. He and the Institute President convened a committee which quickly validated the women’s findings and came up with an action plan. MIT is not perfect, but it had turned around in a big way by 1999 and is now a very good place for (top) women academics.

However the turnaround was facilitated by high levels of money and consensus. The first is genuinely unavailable here and the second often seems nearly as far out of reach.

You make a good point about Law, @MeetMeOnTheCorner . Google is showing me references stating that only about 25% of British Law students will qualify to practise. I always wonder how many potential Law students realise this?

I would think a Law degree is a good qualification for a number of interesting careers, but I wonder how it compares to other Social Science degrees?

This shows the breakdown by subject at Oxford and Business (which will be E&M), Law and Computing have the highest earnings after 5 years (median). Medicine is about half way down. I think as law, business and economics are uncapped you get top part outperforming subjects like medicine which has a much narrower range of salaries and the lower part finding things more challenging. It gives quite a different picture to just looking at the first report.

campusquant.com/uk/universities/oxford/

Cambridge has a similar pattern with social sciences being the highest earning at 5 years.

https://campusquant.com/uk/universities/cambridge/

Economics is the highest earner on that link. Sociel sciences is quite a way down.

Economics is a social science.

I think as law, business and economics are uncapped you get top part outperforming subjects like medicine which has a much narrower range of salaries

Medicine is not capped either. Medical graduates are not required to become doctors, some also become lawyers, financiers or entrepreneurs.

The number of places on medical degrees is
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62594141 and it means the people getting on to medical degrees are very highly qualified.

@OneZanyCat Well it was until the elite unis started wanting Further Maths A level. It’s very mathematical at some unis.

The difference between medicine snd law, business etc is not salaries. It’s that nearly everyone gets a job! Few other subjects can boast that. Plus around 40% of lawyers don’t have law degrees at all. I suspect that will diminish but the numbers on law courses far exceeds law jobs where further training is provided. Law is more of a gamble regarding earnings if you don’t go to an elite uni. Medicine isn’t a gamble. You will work somewhere.

The 20-25% of law graduates qualifying as solicitors takes into account the fact that many solicitors don’t have law degrees.

Computing is another subject up there with law where only a minority get into related work - a big change from 20 years ago when the people whose salaries make up these statistics were graduating.

Agreed. Economics counts as a Social Science, though.

Its only 8% of economics degree holders become economists but its always been up there with medicine for high earnings potential from the higher ranked universities. Its probably because of the saying there are only two things certain in life death and taxes so there will always be work in medicine and finance. Though I would say war is a third certainty of life so defence engineering is probably pretty safe bet. Otherwise its harder to say for next 40 years and any degree with a maths base is a good option for finance. There is higher unemployment rates in private sector careers and redundancy in finance is pretty common but its normally at full pay until something else is obtained so not much of an issue once in and can be a nice break. Before your first job is challenging. There's more computing coming into the economics/finance jobs now but it does seem to go in cycles of popularity.

We have children with Economics degrees and so I know what all their friends are doing and the answer is consulting, banking, PE and increasingly AI. All extremely well paid industries where the applied quantitative skills rather than the "social science" of Economics degrees are highly applicable.

I've worked in banking and PE and DD doing degree now in E&M and in my experience the people with economics degrees were doing roles which used both the maths and the social science / writing / interacting with people and considering human behaviour side. The most maths based roles were for people with maths phds or physics phds. Like studying an economy you would have a model but also need to consider political and economics events which could cause this to change. House prices for property investments you would be considering spending patterns including human behaviour. M&A / sales you would consider human behaviour in how to market both the business and attract people. The value the degree has is combining both.

What you describe is what I mean by "applied" quantitative skills. I wish our children knew how to write 😆

The applied part does tend to go beyond social sciences and into being expected to be a walking, talking encyclopaedia on any random topic - any country in the world politics and economics, any industry sector for prospects (last one I had was would you recommend we invest in a seaweed company with no further information given on financials, marketing, type of seaweed, whether its edible seaweed or not) house prices in any country, any type of share prices, occasionally given reports in different languages to translate. Its quite difficult to be good at everything and often people who are strong at maths are weaker at writing and vice versa but you work together.

The generalist management consultant/M&A analyst profile where young people are deemed sector experts after a lit search and an introductory slide deck following a blank crafted on post-it notes by someone with 2 more years experience? Yup, that's what an Economics degree leads to.

@poetryandwine Yes I know technically it is but FM puts a different slant on it. Much closer to stem on the elite courses.
@OneZanyCat Defence engineering isn’t a degree I know of! Mechanical or aerospace normally and no, it’s not bombproof! We see these industries waver on government policies. Maybe flavour of the month pretty soon, but we buy a lot from abroad. Even engineering degrees have risks attached and for better earnings, grads go into finance. We lose a lot of high calibre engineering grads.

Economics possibly doesn’t attract students wanting to be economist. It’s like lawyers, there’s a gross over supply but it’s the elite unis that will supply most economists. However there’s a huge range of business roles an economics grad can do, like an engineering grad. They have transferable skills.

Even getting into the top law firms doesn’t mean you won’t be weeded out. Around 20% are. There’s few certainties in life and jobs!

All true, @MeetMeOnTheCorner .

When I taught in America a fair number of graduates from all levels - UG, PGT and PGR - went into defence contracting roles. The pay is fabulous but layoffs are built into the system. I assume it is the same in the UK, where fewer of my own students have taken this pathway.

Yes exactly that type of thing @Ceramiq

The roles I have known related to defence engineering are not called defence presumably for safety reasons, they have much more generic job titles and degrees/post grad degrees are most types of engineering/material science and its often not directly for MoD but firms who supply them. Also computing roles re threat of war. I don't want to say too much about where defence related roles are as don't know who reads this. The ones I know aren't especially well paid but never known them lose jobs but the people have a wide skill set and can adapt to change which is key in that. I would imagine like most industries in the private sector the higher the pay the greater the risk of redundancy unless very niche and limited supply.

For engineering sciences, many grads are MEng. That’s perfectly good enough for defence contractors. Some might go on to further study but it’s rarely absolutely necessary but for certain experts, it is. Depends on field.