Is going to university still worth it?
Rose is editor at Financial Interest. With over 15 years of writing experience and a passion for personal finance, she focuses on making money less intimidating, more interesting, and occasionally even fun 🙌
Last updated 28th May 2026
23 min read
University has long been sold as one of life's safest investments: three years in musty lecture halls and essays written in caffeine-fuelled existential dread in exchange for a better-paid career at the end of it all.
But with the cost of getting a degree higher than it's ever been, many fear this social contract has now broken down.
Using the most recent official data, we set out to answer the question: does going to uni still pay off like it once did?
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Do university graduates actually earn more?
This would seem the most sensible question to begin with. And the answer – on average – is yes.
A study conducted by the IFS in conjunction with the Department for Education tracked the real earnings of English graduates who attended university in the mid-2000s, then projected those forward across a full working life.
They found the total lifetime returns of attending university – after pesky things like tax and student loan repayments had been taken into account – is £130,000 for men and £100,000 for women.
That difference shows up in salaries.
Median earnings for non-graduates aged 21-30 is now around £28,300, compared to £35,700 for graduates. Across all age groups, it's £44,100 for grads and £32,000 for non-grads.
Factor in that graduates are 15% more likely to be in work at all, and the financial case for a degree starts to look pretty solid.
But those averages don't tell the full story.
The UK government has one of the most detailed graduate datasets in the world. The Longitudinal Education Outcomes dataset allows us to track exactly what people earn after they leave university, broken down by subject, institution, region, gender and more.
We used the most recent releases, plus data from the government's graduate labour market statistics, to break down what graduates are actually taking home – and how that compares to non-graduates.
The subjects with the highest and lowest graduate earnings
The data tells a clear story here – albeit one that's quite disheartening if you're the creative type.
Top 10 subjects
| Subject | Graduate median earnings 5 years post-uni | Premium vs median earnings for non-grads aged 21-30 |
|---|---|---|
| Medicine & dentistry | £60,900 | +£32,600 |
| Economics | £57,600 | +£23,300 |
| Physics & astronomy | £48,000 | +£19,700 |
| Engineering | £47,500 | +£19,200 |
| Mathematical sciences | £47,500 | +£19,200 |
| Veterinary sciences | £45,900 | +£17,600 |
| Pharmacology & pharmacy | £44,700 | +£16,400 |
| Medical sciences | £44,200 | +£15,900 |
| Computing | £43,400 | +£15,100 |
| Architecture, building & planning | £42,100 | +£13,800 |
Bottom 10 subjects
| Subject | Graduate median earnings 5 years post-uni | Premium vs median earnings for non-grads aged 21-30 |
|---|---|---|
| Performing arts | £28,000 | -£300 |
| Creative arts & design | £29,200 | +£900 |
| Agriculture & food | £30,400 | +£2,100 |
| Education & teaching | £31,300 | +£3,000 |
| Media, journalism and communications | £31,600 | +£3,300 |
| Psychology | £32,100 | +£3,800 |
| Sociology, social policy and anthropology | £32,100 | +£3,800 |
| Health and social care | £32,100 | +£3,800 |
| Sport & exercise sciences | £32,500 | +£4,200 |
| English studies | £32,900 | +£4,600 |
Uni leavers from our top 10 subjects are earning well above both the average graduate salary of £35,700 and the £28,300 that someone who didn't go to university can expect to earn at the same age.
And every degree across our dataset has a positive premium, with the exception of performing arts.
But there's a big difference between a medicine and dentistry grad earning a bonus £32,600 and a creative arts and design grad at £900.
The LEO data gives total wages before any deductions. But a student on the new Plan 5 loan scheme would see close to half of a £900 premium disappear in annual repayments, leaving them little better off in reality.
Once tax is also taken into account, it would take the median creative arts and design graduate far longer than the average UK lifespan to recoup their investment on £50,000 worth of debt.
Depressingly, our LEO dataset also shows that across every subject, five years after graduating, men earn on average £5,000 more than women – a 14.7% gap.
The universities with the highest-earning graduates
So, choosing the right subject can make a big difference. But how much does where you go to university matter?
Well, quite a bit, as it turns out – but only if you can get into a top uni.
Top 10 universities
| University | Graduate median earnings 5 years post-uni | Premium vs median earnings for non-grads aged 21-30 |
|---|---|---|
| The London School of Economics and Political Science | £65,900 | +£37,600 |
| Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine | £61,700 | +£33,400 |
| The University of Oxford | £57,100 | +£28,800 |
| The University of Cambridge | £56,900 | +£28,600 |
| St George's Hospital Medical School | £54,100 | +£25,800 |
| The University of Bath | £54,100 | +£25,800 |
| University College London | £53,000 | +£24,700 |
| The University of Warwick | £50,800 | +£22,500 |
| University of Durham | £50,000 | +£21,700 |
| King's College London | £49,600 | +£21,300 |
Bottom 10 universities
| University | Graduate median earnings 5 years post-uni | Premium vs median earnings for non-grads aged 21-30 |
|---|---|---|
| University of Wales Trinity Saint David | £27,500 | -£800 |
| University of Sunderland | £28,000 | -£300 |
| Norwich University of the Arts | £28,000 | -£300 |
| Glyndwr University | £28,300 | £0 |
| Falmouth University | £28,300 | £0 |
| Birmingham Newman University | £28,800 | +£500 |
| The University of Bolton | £28,800 | +£500 |
| University College Birmingham | £29,200 | +£900 |
| University of the Highlands and Islands | £29,200 | +£900 |
| University for the Creative Arts | £29,600 | +£1,300 |
Across all 127 universities in our study, all had a positive premium compared to the median non-grad salary, except the four universities at the top of the table above.
But the difference in earnings is pretty striking: LSE grads at five years post-uni earn an average of £65,900 – that's £37,600 above the median non-grad salary in the 21-30 age range, and a staggering £38,400 more than a University of Wales Trinity Saint David grad.
Once student loans are factored in, students from our bottom 10 unis would be even worse off. For example, a Birmingham Newham University grad on Plan 5 would repay around £369 annually, wiping out most of their premium entirely.
The majority of top-earning graduates come from Russell Group unis – arguably the closest equivalent the UK has to the US Ivy League.
In fact, median earnings for Russell Group graduates after five years is £39,800 compared to the rest of the pack at £29,200 – a £10,600 annual premium.
IFS data shows that both men and women benefit from attending a Russell group uni, but men benefit far more than women, with lifetime returns of a staggering £635,000 compared to £268,000.
But men at the least selective universities actually end up with lower lifetime returns than women at the same institutions – £95,000 versus £215,000.
This implies that simply attending any university is a much greater benefit to women, who might otherwise have ended up in lower-paid work. For men, on the other hand, attending a more selective university pays off far more significantly.
Graduate pay: going nowhere fast
So, our data reveals that for most people, going to university does indeed pay off.
However, when we look deeper into the government data on graduate and non-graduate pay, an altogether more depressing narrative emerges.
Although everyone's pay has been rising in nominal terms (that is, the face value of wages), almost all of that rise has been down to inflation.
If we look at the chart below, the actual story is told by the lines for "real wages" – that means salaries adjusted for inflation. So, what people's pay actually buys, rather than just the number on their payslip.
In real terms, non-graduate wages for 21-30-year-olds have been essentially flat since 2007 – starting at £17,000 and ending at £17,000 nearly two decades later.
But graduates have actually fared worse. Real graduate wages for the same age group have fallen 6.5% over the same period, from £23,000 to £21,500.
So although graduates are still earning more, that premium is rapidly diminishing.
Part of the reason is that real wages have barely moved since the 2008 financial crisis, as productivity across the entire economy has stalled.
Minimum wage legislation has also provided a floor for non-graduate earnings that has broadly kept pace with inflation over the period, while graduate jobs don't have an equivalent floor.
In the graduate jobs market, it's also a numbers game. Back in the 90s, only around 25% of people stayed in full-time education or training after the age of 18. Today, close to 40% head off to uni. Under the laws of supply and demand, more graduates chasing the same jobs naturally pushes wages down.
A degree of uncertainty: the outlook for today's grads
The problems for today's uni leavers don't end with stagnant wages.
They're also contending with a serious graduate employment crisis, with vacancies reaching their lowest level since anyone started keeping track.
And the long-term impact of unemployment early on in a career can be huge. Economists call it "scarring", and it can mean reduced career potential and slower earnings growth for years afterwards.
Then add that to a student loan system that's getting tougher.
Students now leave uni with an average debt of £53,000. And while we're used to hearing about the rough deal handed to Plan 2 students, those on the new Plan 5 system have it worse in many respects.
Although the punishing above-inflation interest rate has been scrapped, Plan 5 grads start repaying at a lower salary threshold of £25,000, and continue for up to 40 years – a full decade longer than their Plan 2 predecessors.
This means that for many lower and middle earners, repayments become a decades-long drag on income – less like a conventional loan, and much more like an additional graduate tax that can linger throughout an entire working life.
And while a student loan isn't considered "debt" in the traditional sense – no one's going to be knocking down your door to grab your PlayStation if you can't pay it back – that doesn't mean the cost disappears.
It shows up in different ways instead: smaller monthly take-home pay, tighter mortgage affordability checks, and slower progress towards building any kind of financial cushion.
Which is a lot to weigh up when you're seventeen, staring at a UCAS form, and your biggest financial decision up to that point has been whether to splash out on an extra side at Nando's.
Bottom line
Taken as a whole, the data still points in the same direction it has for decades: for most people, going to university increases earnings. But the days when any degree from any university was a guaranteed ticket to a better-paid career are firmly behind us.
Our analysis shows is that the returns vary enormously – by subject, by institution, and even by gender.
The decision to go to university, in other words, has never been more worth thinking carefully about. Not just whether to go, but what to study, where to study it, and what the realistic financial picture looks like at the other end.
Because increasingly, that's the difference between a degree that pays off handsomely, and one that costs you more than it gives back.
Methodology
All graduate earnings data in this analysis is drawn from the Department for Education's Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset, 2022-23 tax year release.
Non-graduate earnings figures for ages 21-30 are drawn from the Department for Education's Graduate Labour Market Statistics (2024).
To make all figures comparable, we uprated both the LEO data and the Graduate Labour Market Statistics data to 2025 values using the ONS Average Weekly Earnings index (series KAB9, seasonally adjusted total pay).
Financial Interest provides guidance, not advice. If you’re unsure about anything, speak with a qualified adviser. When investing, your capital is always at risk. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
