A graduate will now earn on average £160,000 more in a lifetime than
a non- graduate, who attained 2 more A level qualifications.
The gender difference in these earnings is £153,000 for men and £168,000
for women.
Within this average there is a range from £340,315 for medical and dental graduates to £51,549 for a humanities degree and £34,949 for an arts degree.
What will I earn as a new graduate?
New graduates do not necessarily earn a great deal more than their contemporaries,
who did not go to university. However, many careers are simply not open to
non-graduates eg all the professions like medicine, law, engineering and teaching.
Other job categories, such as media and publishing, also recruit almost exclusively
from graduates, even though specific professional qualifications are not involved.
There is a very wide range of salaries for new graduates, which depends on
subject, experience and location. A realistic approach is to look at the starting
salaries on graduate job recruitment web sites, like Prospects at www.prospects.ac.uk
. Prospects publishes this information, along with a break-down of the figures
by job category. The current results are
£24,048 average starting salary offered by recruiters advertising in search
job vacancies in the winter 2007/2008 edition of Prospects Directory.
