Professor Anna Vignoles

This report provides estimates of the earnings returns to completing postgraduate degrees, for British and Northern Irish students studying in Britain.

Graduates from higher income families (with median income of around £77,000) have average earnings which are 20% higher than those from lower income families (with median income of around £26,000). Once we condition on institution and subject choices, this premium roughly halves, to around 10%.

This report estimates the impact on earnings of attending HE compared with not going. The authors detail how this varies by subject and institution of study, as well as how these returns vary by gender, prior educational attainment and the sorts of subjects individuals have studied up to age 18. The report makes use of the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset, which links together tax, benefit, higher education and school records to provide a rich description of individuals’ trajectories through the education system and into the labour market.

It is well known that the average graduate earns more than non graduates, and that university graduates from certain subjects and from certain universities earn considerably more than others. For example, five years after graduation, men from the highest earnings universities earn almost 50% more than graduates from other Russell Group universities (30% for women), while male Russell Group graduates earn over 40% more than those who attended the average post-1992 institution (35% for women).

We summarise the recent evidence produced by the IFS which relates to the post-18 funding review.

There are longstanding concerns about the recruitment and retention of teachers in the UK . In recent years there has also been much debate about the extent to which changes to the initial teacher education system have affected the recruitment and retention problem. These concerns are most acute in so called “shortage” subject areas, such as physics .

This paper uses tax and student loan administrative data to measure how the earnings of English graduates around 10 years into the labour market vary with gender, institution attended, subject and socioeconomic background.

This Executive Summary accompanies a new IFS working paper which uses administrative data to measure how the earnings of English graduates around 10 years into the labour market vary with gender, institution attended, subject and socioeconomic background.

The authors find that very broadly the LFS (Labour Force Survey) and administrative data show a similar distribution of graduates’ earnings. However, the administrative data has considerably less gender disparity, higher high quantiles and more time series persistence. The authors also report on how the distribution of graduate and non-graduate earnings fell during each year of the Great Recession.

This paper focuses on individuals who have completed university and provides new evidence on differences in graduates’ earnings by socio-economic background, with a particular focus on whether they attended a private school.

New research from CMPO, IFS and the University of Cambridge suggests families with lower socio-economic status have less access to higher performing schools than families with higher socio-economic status.