In brief: The educational background of postgrad students

2020

Postgraduate education has expanded rapidly in the last couple of decades, with more than 350,000 students now starting a postgraduate course in the UK each year, compared with only around half this number 20 years ago. As increasing numbers of students consider postgraduate study, accurate information on the returns to the different options they face is essential for allowing them to make an informed decision on whether, where and what to study. Previous evidence on the returns to postgraduate study in the UK has generally implied that the returns are quite large and positive. However, the current evidence on postgraduate returns has faced serious limitations, primarily due to data availability. This report provides estimates of the earnings returns to completing postgraduate degrees for British and Northern Irish students studying in Britain. It uses the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset to account for differences in individuals' background and prior university att...

Intergenerational Foundation, 2014

This report poses the provocative question: “Do we want our future economists, sociologists and historians to be those with the brightest minds and the best ideas or those whose parents have the biggest wallets?” The answer is surely the former rather than the latter, but this study makes it clear that postgraduate higher education in England is currently moving in a direction which will make it harder and harder for bright students from poor backgrounds to gain access to the academic profession. The report argues that those who cannot rely on their parents to fund a postgraduate education for them are increasingly being squeezed out by government funding cuts, or forced into taking out expensive Professional and Career Development Loans which charge a higher rate of interest than many forms of commercial borrowing. Even if they do manage to afford postgraduate study, changes in staffing arrangements at universities mean that nearly half of all teaching-only staff are now employed using zero-hours contracts. This report makes a convincing argument that it is becoming ever more difficult for young academics to find stable, fairly-reward academic posts at England’s universities, while at the same time pay and benefits for senior academics and Vice-Chancellors has continued to rocket upwards since the recession. Finally, thanks to a £13 billion deficit in the Universities Superannuation Scheme – the main pension scheme for university employees – today’s younger academics can expect to retire up to 30% worse-off than their older colleagues because of changes to contributions and benefits. Overall, this report argues that today’s young people face an enormous range of disincentives when it comes to entering the academic profession, a development which should be enormously concerning to anyone who cares about the quality of intellectual life in Britain.

2011

This paper provides estimates of the impact of higher education qualifications on the earnings of graduates in the UK by subject studied. We use data from the recent UK Labour Force Surveys which provide a sufficiently large sample to consider the effects of the subject studied, class of first degree, and postgraduate qualifications. Ordinary Least Squares estimates show high average returns for women that does not differ by subject.

2019

Following human capital theory, the investment in education should result in wage gains over time and increased productivity. Thuswise, some governments became more active in stimulating citizens into pursuing advanced degrees by introducing loans and other support schemes. British policy makers went further by first launching graduate loans for students pursuing Master degrees followed by announcing the loan scheme for PhD students to start in 2018. Will keeping more young professionals away from joining the labour force and increasing their educational debt pay off in economic terms for those students? This systematic literature review is motivated by the possible contradiction in governmental objective to increase the number of doctoral students, while their ability to find the jobs which fit their qualifications and payment expectations might be questioned. This review shows that systematic data on doctoral graduates and the labour market is quite limited, with employers outside academia mostly being unsatisfied with lack of 'commercial awareness', flexibility and adaptivity to new environments in young PhD degree holders. At the same time the role of the degree and expectations coming with it are changing and doctorate students are expected not only to produce a thesis, but to teach, publish papers and develop transferable skills.

2018

Supply side economic policies designed to encourage participation in postgraduate education have the ultimate goal to improve productivity of the workforce. For such policies to deliver the expected impact, they should be designed taking into consideration individual perceptions of “self” in relation to educational experiences and credit market imperfections. In his 2014 UK Autumn statement, the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced the provision of postgraduate loans of £10,000 each to benefit 40,000 students from the 2016/17 academic session and onwards. Targeted at prospective students below the age of 30, this policy aims at developing a higher-skilled workforce by providing access to students especially from low-income backgrounds. Thus, through this initiative, the government hopes to improve the public return on higher education through offering the prospects for a higher private return to higher education. This research explores the effects of this policy on two types of ind...

University of Warwick. Department of Economics, 2021

The version presented here is a Working Paper (or 'pre-print') that may be later published elsewhere.

In this paper, we use the individual-level USR data for the whole population of 1993 leavers from the`old' universities of the UK to investigate the determinants of graduate occupational earnings. Among other results, we¯nd that there are signi¯cant di®erences in the occupational earnings of leavers, according to: university attended, subject studied, degree class awarded, and Social Class of family background, ceteris paribus. Our results suggest that there is likely to be signi¯cant variation around the average rate of return to ā rst degree, with important implications for the debate on the funding of students through higher education.

Higher Education Funding and Access in International Perspective, 2018

This chapter draws on findings from a comparative, qualitative research project that investigated the decision-making of different groups of English higher education students in central England as they graduated from a Russell group university (46 interviewees) and a Post-92 university (28 interviewees). Half of the students graduated in 2014 (lower tuition fees regime) and the other half graduated in 2015 (higher tuition fees regime). The students interviewed were sampled by socioeconomic background, gender, degree subject/discipline and secondary school type. Semi-structured interviews were used to explore students' future plans and perceptions of their future job prospects. Despite higher debt levels, the 2015 sample of Russell Group graduates from lower socioeconomic backgrounds had a positive view of their labour market prospects and a high proportion had achieved either a graduate job or a place on a postgraduate course prior to graduation. This group had saved money whilst studying. The 2015 sample of Post-1992 University graduates (from both lower and average socioeconomic backgrounds) were worried about their level of debt, future finances and labour market prospects. This chapter raises questions about whether a fairer university finance system, involving lower levels of debt for graduates from less advantaged backgrounds, might avoid some graduates' transitions to adulthood being so strongly influenced by financial anxieties.

Performance Practice Review, 1997