A university judged on graduate salaries is a dog wagged by its tail

The debate that has blown up in the past couple of weeks about the level of student debt among English graduates is of a piece with worries that the graduate earnings premium is declining – and may be non-existent for some students.

I understand that concern. Before Christmas, I came across a news item about the national living wage coming “dangerously close” to some graduate starting salaries, and my initial reaction was: “Oh, that does sound bad.” But then I checked myself. Is it genuinely bad – and if so, why?

We’ve certainly seen a growing number of prospective students asking about their future employment prospects in recent years. We’ve seen student surveys report that more and more are choosing their degrees with employment and salary goals in mind.

And we can see from data that the gap between graduate starting salaries and the national living wage has indeed narrowed over time. In some cases it may indeed have disappeared – but this seems to be relatively rare. Based on standard working hours, the national living wage of £13.45 translates into an annual salary of just over £26,000. The Institute of Student Employers’ 2024 survey reported an average graduate starting salary of £32,000, based on responses from large employers: hardly “dangerously close”.

Data from Handshake for 2024 demonstrates that starting salaries differ significantly depending on the industry, however. For example, average starting salaries are about £44,000 in law, £36,000 in finance and around £34,000 in digital or IT roles. Starting salaries in public services tend to be lower: newly-qualified teachers in England earn £33,000 and qualified registered nurses in the NHS can expect about £31,000. But public sector salaries reflect the public funding we’re willing to invest in those services; they say nothing about the education received by our vital teachers, nurses, police officers and other public sector workers.

It is probably inevitable – and perfectly reasonable – that if students are asked to bear a greater burden for the cost of their studies than those in previous generations, they ask what they’ll “get” for the money, with attendant queries about their resulting labour market outcomes. In this system, students are swayed towards what the economy will pay the most for, rather than what our society needs to underpin a healthy nation.

But while securing higher wages may be an outcome of higher education, this is not its purpose. Universities have evolved from religious institutions focused on training the clergy into liberal institutions charged with the cultivation of well-rounded, informed, democratic citizens. And it remains our collective purpose to prepare individuals for a wide range of roles in society – not always well remunerated – alongside promoting general knowledge and intellectual development.

The librarian who hosts reading circles at your local library and the dance company keeping kids busy with after-school activities are invaluable to their communities. But they are paid what the economy thinks they’re worth – which may be very different from what society thinks they are worth and bear little relation to the quality of the degrees they undertook. 

As well as a range of professionals, a healthy society increasingly needs well-rounded, informed individuals who can navigate the complex digital and political landscape that has come to define life in the 21st century. A prevalence of such individuals makes populations as a whole harder to manipulate with disinformation and appeals to base instincts.

The UK’s higher education institutions have come from a long history of promoting the classic liberal principles of individual autonomy, liberty, reason, political equality and rule of law. We are the spaces in which ideas, both controversial and unremarkable, can be debated respectfully in the interest of the pursuit of truth. We are where new knowledge is formed and common knowledge is debated as times change.

As I said recently at our GuildHE annual conference, living up to this heritage is more, not less, important in 2025 than it was before English tuition fees were tripled in 2012. And nor is it a lower priority for those institutions focused on practical, vocational training than it is for those offering philosophy degrees. Both types of institution teach students to challenge their assumptions, to question the body of knowledge into which they are immersing themselves, and to open their minds to new understandings. 

This type of education isn’t less important for some types of students than others, either. For those who enter a post-study job and feel as though they aren’t using their degree directly – that’s not uncommon. Personally, my degree was irrelevant to the three short-term jobs I held after I graduated. But it still enabled me to understand the world within which I was moving. I knew how to critically reason and seek out verifiable information. I knew to be suspicious of that which is fed to us through dominant narratives.

So rather than answering the “what do I get” question with a battery of salary estimates, we, as a collective, should do more to explain to school-leavers that their time at university will enhance their intellectual, technical, creative and social capabilities in ways that will enable them to take advantage of opportunities and navigate their future paths in ways they would be unable to without it.

We must push harder against reductive characterisations, processes and regulatory suggestions that universities frame higher education as job training. And we must demand a level of public investment that acknowledges its benefit to both individuals and our society. Nothing short of that will do.

Brooke Storer-Church is CEO of GuildHE.