It can be reasonably argued that, historically, graduates have tended to get higher-paid and more rewarding careers for two reasons. One is that their degree directly prepared them for a demanding and prestigious career. The other was that it broadened and enhanced their general academic excellence and, thereby, made them more employable. The second group tended to outnumber the first.

But as higher education participation rates grow, we create more graduates who are, by definition, academically average, who go on to lower-paid careers. So do they financially benefit from their degrees?

Universities would certainly have you think so. Report after report is churned out by sector lobbyists and thinktanks giving the impression that becoming a graduate, in whatever subject, remains a one-way ticket to financial success even though participation rates are now around 50 per cent.

A from 2020 reported that the average UK graduate’s net lifetime earnings are ?130,000 higher for men and ?100,000 for women, once taxes and student loan repayments have been taken into account. During my research, I lost count of the number of times I saw those figures cited in other reports or articles in support of university expansion.

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But school-leavers considering entering higher education in 2025 should ignore such numbers. As well as arguably having certain methodological flaws, they are based on graduates from the mid-2000s, when participation was about 30-35 per cent. The extra (marginal) candidates that have been added are likely to achieve a much lower graduate premium.

Moreover, the IFS report concedes that, even among those who graduated 20 years ago, about one in five?would have been better off financially had they not gone to university. In his recent policy paper, “”, former universities minister David Willetts calls this an “uncomfortable finding” and concedes that the overall average graduate premium has been declining because marginal graduates are achieving a lower premium. However, he attributes this to factors such as rises in the minimum wage that may not be sustained and wage restraint in the public sector that may not continue. And he resists the conclusion that, on university expansion, “we have over-shot and some people are going [to university] whose marginal returns are below zero”.

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I disagree. On my analysis, the marginal graduate premium disappeared a full two decades ago, when the UK went above 30 per cent participation. It’s just that we haven’t noticed – perhaps because the only figure being reported is the overall average graduate premium, which remains positive long after the average marginal graduate premium disappears.

My report, “”, demonstrates that the large falls in the overall average graduate premium between 2007 and 2023 are most plausibly explained if the extra graduates achieved no average graduate premium at all. That is, 160,000 of the UK’s 2024 student intake of 495,000 will earn around the same as or less than non-graduates. But, unlike non-graduates, they will have their personal finances blighted by having to pay 9 per cent tax on earnings above ?25,000 for decades. Many more will only achieve a very modest premium that will hardly justify the level of debt.

But can I be sure? Well, because of the nature of scenario-based analysis, I suggest a reasonable margin of error should be allowed of plus or minus 5 per cent. But whatever way you look at it, the biggest indictment of UK HE policy is that tens of thousands of pounds of debt have been piled on to hundreds of thousands of students without any robust evidence that it is to their own advantage – or to that of taxpayers given that a lot of student debt ends up being written off.

The annual graduate labour market statistics still record . But this is a blunt instrument for assessing whether higher education participation has reached or surpassed optimal levels. The statistics agencies have all failed to quantify the basic concept of diminishing marginal salary returns from university expansion.

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As Harry Snart, a for the Royal Statistical Society, notes in a comment reproduced in my report, my work “demonstrates why we need better insight into the costs and benefits of higher education…As the average graduate premium decreases it is likely that the proportion of graduates achieving very low, or negative, graduate premiums will increase. Given the lack of publicly available data, it is not possible to quantify this directly with certainty. The scenario-based analysis in?Paul Wiltshire’s report reasonably illustrates how the decline…might look given the assumptions that he makes.”

Snart also endorses my view that graduate pay premium data should be broken down by prior academic attainment. The glut of graduates is such that many are ending up in entry-level roles that they could easily have done as school-leavers with some on-the-job training and some pre-existing attributes, such as academic ability, work ethic and ambition. To make sensible decisions about university participation rates, we need to compare like with like: the earnings of, for example, a graduate with three Cs at A level compared with a non-graduate with three Cs.

While the fall in the marginal graduate premium demonstrates the common-sense expectation that a degree is going to be less use to you if you are less innately academic, the demand for extra graduates will vary by field. Hence, graduate premiums should also be broken down by subject. Additionally, we need to assess whether what graduates learn in their course genuinely has any bearing on their careers by tracking the correlation between degree subject and career.

Society shouldn’t stand back and allow what can only be described as a mis-selling of degrees on an industrial scale. The sector needs to cut the opportunity-for-all hype. The statistics agencies need to get their houses in order. And policymakers need to limit university places where they are helping no one but the university itself. ??

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Paul Wiltshire is the father of four UK university graduates and current students. His report is published on his website, , and on the website of the Oxford Centre for 黑料吃瓜网 Policy Studies.?