Lowest graduate salaries ‘on a par with minimum wage’
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/lowest-graduate-salaries-on-a-par-with-minimum-wage-rbzjwjjxl
Posted by ParkedUpWithCoffee
Lowest graduate salaries ‘on a par with minimum wage’
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/lowest-graduate-salaries-on-a-par-with-minimum-wage-rbzjwjjxl
Posted by ParkedUpWithCoffee
26 Comments
Well yeah. The lowest value degrees are essentially worthless to companies, so why would they pay more for someone who has one?
People need to realise that getting a degree doesn’t necessarily make you worth any more to employers, or entitle you to a higher paid job.
The lowest are below minimum wage, often in roles that pretend it’s not a salary, e.g. PhD stipends are now substantially below minimum wage.
Yeah I have a master’s from a top 5 university in the world for my subject and the entry-level jobs in my industry are around minimum wage. This is made worse considering that 99% of jobs in my industry are located in Central London meaning the cost of living isn’t exactly cheap. You either have insane rents closer to your job or you have expensive travel costs with still pretty costly rents further out. I got lucky because my dad bought a small, quite low-quality house back when they were cheap in a place from which I can commute into Central London, but I’d never be able to afford travel PLUS rent PLUS bills.
Many industries (considering how London-centric so much of our economy is, especially in ‘professionalised’ fields) are thus effectively locked off to poorer-off and most working-class people because I suppose you’re expected to have your income supplemented by your parents or something. Most people in my industry ARE from posh backgrounds and even entry-level jobs are extremely competitive so they can afford to get away with it.
I can’t see behind the paywall.
Grads never were necessarily high earners. Even in well paid industries, grad schemes are often paid less because it’s a training role.
A lot of wages have stagnated. At the same time, the minimum wage has just rise again.
Well its not like they are going to be any lower are they
Is this because so many more people have degrees and there are more universities, not all of which are that great? I’d imagine a 2:2 from Durham in 1990 would be ‘worth’ far more than a first from the University of Roehampton in 2023.
When everyone’s a uni graduate, having a degree doesn’t matter so much. When I went to uni only about 5% of school leavers did, now it’s something like ten times that.
Also in a lot of roles especially desirable ones like in the media, or ‘caring’ ones like charities or nursing, people seem to be expected to put up with shit wages, degree or no degree, because you’re doing it for love, supposedly.
I don’t want to get all “yer da” over this, but whenever people question the use of various social studies, arts and humanities degrees it’s “not all degrees are just for salary” and then people turn around and complain that those degrees don’t lead to higher pay. The reality is an art degree and maths / engineering / finance degree are not equal and won’t lead to equal salaries, nor should they.
I’m not surprised graduate salaries are lower than in 2001 either, a far higher % of people go. I graduated within the past few years and I knew so, so many people doing degrees aimlessly only to graduate and get a job that a) doesn’t need a degree (so why would having one give you an advantage?) or b) is completely unrelated to the degree.
Thank the TORIES for the mess the country is in …. 14 years of it
This is exactly the problem with raising the minimum wage in isolation. Don’t get me wrong, as the cost of living increases, so must the minimum wage. However, raising minimum wage alone squeezes the salary distribution, effectively disincentivising people from entering more “advanced” professions. Ultimately, we end up with unproductive society and economy tipping into recession.
This is a very complex issue that is also very difficult to address. One solution that is in place e.g. in Austria is implemented through a so-called collective bargaining, where trade unions for every industry annually agree a pay rise for all workers across different levels that reflects inflation (even for non-members). You can stay in the same job for years, and your salary will go up each year. Unfortunately, the structure of the unions in Austria is different, so is the attitude towards the unions.
Majority of degrees lost their value a few years after Blair pushed degrees on everyone. Once you saturate the market in anything it becomes less valuable.
Now DEI pushes the narrative only fortunate people can go to Uni so outside of high skilled roles (engineering etc) you don’t need a degree in a-lot of areas in Sales and Marketing. We’ll probably continue this slight adjustment back to non degrees where it makes sense I guess.
A degree doesn’t mean you have a divine right for anything – BUT it may mean there’s a field of study / that results in a career that eventually you could earn a lot. You are also fighting other people on the ladder the whole way as the pyramid gets smaller.
GDP per capita is falling, High skilled jobs are actually decreasing in our economy (5% reduction if I remember correctly in the last few years) as we flood our nation with low skilled foreign employees. Reductions in oil and Gas in the UK for example could lose 100k high paid / skills jobs by 2030. Gov Investment or attracting big business is critical to readjusting this worrying trend.
Should read the article I know. All I can add from my experience when recruiting in Media Land. A BA degree tells me you have a baseline knowledge and stand out from other candidates however you are not going to be worth any real money until you have, Firstly recieved a lot of training and handed down experience, Secondly demonstrated personality traits that just barely were discernable at interview. When I first got shoved into graduate recruitment I was mildly surprised at how much work I was going to have to do as a manager over the first year or so to bring on the recruits to a point at which they began to return the value of a salary. Nothing against them, there were some great recruits (and a couple of dreadful ones), there were some I wouldn’t have employed on their best day. I might have been less surprised if I had gone the degree route myself rather than getting in on a lucky break and worked my way up.
Part I even Part II Architecture wages are also hovering around this level. 7 years of intense uni to get tuppence. Its great
I’m not even a particularly low earner but I’m certainly not a high earner and I have a stressful job with long hours.
There’s genuinely a part of me that would willingly sacrifice everything and get a job collecting glasses in the local pub for not much less than I’m earning now.
Not surprising. We are a country who aspired to be a high skill economy with pushes for higher education and yet heavily promoted high skill immigration.
Now companies have very little appetite to train domestic workers with grad schemes opting instead to hire foreign workers to fill the skill gaps that could be addressed by grad schemes.
This is also meant that the few grad schemes left are heavily competitive putting a massive downward pressure on pay. Companies need to be heavily taxed for hiring foreign workers and start being incentivised to train domestic workers. Raise employer NI for expats, lower taxes for domestic workers for their first 2 years of work. Something to make training domestic workers more attractive than just getting another foreign worker to fill the gap.
Meanwhile, Microsoft are paying their grads working in AI up to around $190k in Seattle.
Is this actually that surprising? Okay you’ve got your degree but what work experience do you have?
I graduated from a Russell Group uni in 2017 and my first role at entry level accounting was 15k. Left 2 years later for a role at 35k. Accounting industry btw
i worked for a charity for disadvantaged people and was on 18.5k a year a few years ago. absolutely shocking and i wouldn’t have been able to afford that for much longer than i did. i was in London
Is it controversial that anybody working for any company, unless the job is “volunteer work” for a charity, should be paid minimum wage or above? Like how are there allowed to be loopholes
When I graduated with a degree in Graphic Design in 2011 my starting wage was £13,500 – my brother, who graduated with the same degree in 1994 started out on £14,000. My generation has been consistently fucked every step of the way.
What are the toilet paper degrees which are lowering the average? Maybe I missed it.
I went to college for 2 years finished with top grades went to university for 3 years finished with top grades, applied for between 100-200 positions luckily got a job through nepotism
I now make a little bit more than minimum wage and i know people on benefits who are just as well off as me and provided with social housing
Why wouldn’t it be. No actual job experience, just a degree. Minimum wage sounds fair to begin with.
Being a graduate doesn’t mean you can skip the shit jobs stage.
They lied when they said it could.
I think the fault in people’s logic is this: “I have a undergrad/masters/phd degree (s) therefore I deserve a high salary”.
That may have worked back in the 1960s, but it’s time to get with the times people!
This is necessarily the case – the Low Pay Commission (which advises in minimum wage) has a mandate to set minimum wage at 2/3 of the median wage. This means that a significant chunk of jobs must be at or close to minimum wage. Add that to the large number of graduates in the economy and you will get a lot of grads working for minimum wage. Even if median wages increased rapidly you would still get this as long as you have the 2/3 target.
It’d almost like we’re still stuck in a class-based society where having a degree means you should be paid a “doctor” or “engineer” salary. When in reality it should be market or needs driven, otherwise we’ll end up in a world with more civil engineers than builders