Some basic stats on graduate salaries

Technorati tags: graduate salaries,degrees,universities

Since there's a lot of confusion about what graduates in the UK (or indeed anyone) actually earn, let's take a look at what's out there.

Let's kick off with the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), the Government's own salary survey.

There was a bit of a hiccup this year when they had to reissue part of the data, but that's by the by. According to the ASHE, the mean, annual, gross salary in the UK in 2005 was £23,400.

OK, so there is the average UK wage, which does include all part-time workers and so on.

Now, let's look at the 2005 Destinations of Leavers of Higher Education Survey by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, which polled all leavers of first degrees in 2004. They found the average starting salary for graduates 6 months after graduating (in other words, at the start of 2005) was £17,029

Ok, so that's much lower than the national average. But then does anyone really expect 21 year olds to earn above the national average?

Let's move on to Professor Peter Elias and Professor Kate Purcell again. From the Class of 99 research I mentioned earlier in the week, they found that the mean salary of graduates from 1999 had reached £23,754 in 2003/4 - in other words, 3 and a half years after graduating, a typical graduate was already earning above the current national average wage. (The information's on page 105, if you want to look it up).

But the question remains difficult to answer. If anyone asks me 'what's the average salary for a graduate?', I can point at some rather old research from Graduate Prospects based on the old Labour Force Survey, showing the average weekly graduate salary was £605 between 2001 and 2002, but beyond that, there's not a lot about the whole population, or even large groups of it. Graduate Prospects' Labour Market FAQs can help with some of these questions, but if anyone tells you how much a graduate earns, I'd ask them some very searching questions about their data. And if it sounds good, let me know, because we can always use good salary data.