Research and analysis

Undergraduate degrees: labour market returns

Analysis of the estimated absolute economic value of degrees, comparing higher education students and graduates’ earnings with similar individuals at age 29.

• From: Department for Education
• Published: 27 November 2018
• Last updated: 6 December 2018
  Show all updates

  1. 6 December 2018

     Appendix data tables updated: table 16 figures corrected.

  2. 27 November 2018

     First published.

Documents

The impact of undergraduate degrees on early-career earnings

Ref: ISBN 978-1-78105-970-8, DFE-RR808

PDF, 844 KB, 82 pages

The absolute labour market returns to different degrees - appendix data tables

MS Excel Spreadsheet, 445 KB

Details

This research looks at over 1,200 courses offered across UK universities.

It uses the Longitudinal Education Outcomes dataset to consider background characteristics like:

• class
• ethnicity
• GCSE results

This is to estimate the absolute earnings return from different university courses.

The first publication in this research series, relative labour market returns are also available.