'Wage premium’ of a degree falls by a third under university boom
The value of a degree has slumped by almost a third in the last 20 years because of a sharp rise in the number of people taking university courses.
According to Malcolm Brynin, from Essex University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research, conducting a major research study on the benefits of university education, the advantage of a university degree is on the decline as employers routinely demand degrees even for relatively low-skilled occupations.
He said successive governments had “masked” the risk of taking a university course by repeatedly emphasising the advantages and failing to acknowledge that many students struggle to earn more than average wage.Young people have been “led to believe by the assertions of economists and politicians that education pays”, he said. “Many graduates benefit little from their degrees,” he added. “Getting a degree is a gamble.”
“In his study, Dr Brynin found that a degree holder in 1993 earned 52 per cent more than someone with no qualifications, while those with A-levels earned 14 per cent extra. It represented a difference of 38 percentage points between a degree and A-levels.
But the study – originally published in the British Sociological Association journal – found that the difference had narrowed to 27 percentage points by 2008, a reduction of almost a third in the "graduate premium".
At the same time, almost half of graduates who went into non-manual work in 1993 earned 30 per cent more than the average wage for the time. But by 2008, just 23 per cent fell into this relatively high-earning category.
Dr Brynin said the change had been made because a degree was now increasingly seen as a “prerequisite for a good job”, with entire occupations now staffed completely by graduates that may previously have hired students with A-levels.
He added: “The Government’s claim [of the importance of a degree] becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: more people enter work as graduates, so more jobs seem to be graduate jobs.”
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For further reading see:
In Praise of the Economic Students at the Sorbonne: The Class of 2000
http://www.gcgi.info/blog/392-in-praise-of-the-economic-students-at-the-sorbonne-the-class-of-2000
Small is Beautiful: The Wisdom of E.F. Schumacher
http://www.gcgi.info/news/128-small-is-beautiful-the-wisdom-of-ef-schumacher
Towards an Education Worth Believing In
http://www.gcgi.info/news/133-towards-an-education-worth-believing-in
Economics and Economists Engulfed By Crises: What Do We Tell the Students?
Towards an Education Worth Believing In - Education as Transformation: A Conversation with Dr. Mofid
http://www.spiritualeducation.org/work/conf2013/mofid