 By Graham Trickey, Editor, Prospects, 11/01/2005. Graduates will go straight into jobs paying an average salary of £22,000, according to recent headlines. Not long before, the news was that nearly 40 per cent of graduates entering the labour market started in jobs which do not need a degree, and are therefore probably poorly paid. If you are confused about what a graduate is worth, you are not the only one. As higher education has massively expanded in recent years, old assumptions about what most graduates can expect in their careers have been put in doubt. A minority still do go straight into well-paid jobs. The £22,000 figure quoted above is from mainly blue-chip firms who advertise in Prospects Directory. A more widely relevant figure for new graduates comes from the Higher Education Statistics Agency. They ask every former student about their employment. Far from everyone disclosed their pay but, for those that did, the middle figure was a not-to-bad £17,000. Research on a much smaller scale carried out by NatWest Bank put the average at only £13,422. Whatever the national average, there are differences between new graduates from individual universities - between for instance the average at Imperial College of £24,247 and £12,968 for University of Wales Aberystwyth, according to HESA figures quoted in the Sunday Times. And even in the 21st century men still tend to be paid more than women. Fortunately, where individual graduates’ current pay is low, they are likely to do better when they finally establish themselves in a career. The great majority eventually achieve a graduate-level job of some sort, say the gurus of graduate careers research, Professors Peter Elias and Kate Purcell. The two researchers have studied how much more graduates gets paid than other people. This premium has sometimes been put as high as 70% for graduates later in life and has been used by government politicians to make a case that top-up fees are worth paying. But the most recent findings from Elias and Purcell put a question mark over such large premiums continuing. The two researchers were reported in The Times as finding that graduates from 1999 were earning 11% less (in real terms) than graduates from four years before. Exactly what this means for the earnings of today's graduates when they get to be aged 50 or so is anyone's guess, but it is reasonable to expect that when half the population are graduates the proportion who earn big salaries will be lower than today. So most of us will have to keep plans for a champagne lifestyle on hold, even though some do have starting salaries of £22,000 or more.
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