A Quarter of UK grads are low earners

Yes. Graduate wages are heavily amplified in perception by IB, the big 4, law. It's not the norm for the majority.

I can see why if they can't correctly spell 'quarter'.

Yes. Graduate wages are heavily amplified in perception by IB, the big 4, law. It's not the norm for the majority.

Yes. Graduate wages are heavily amplified in perception by IB, the big 4, law. It's not the norm for the majority.

I would say it's not just IB that inflates students expectations. Remember that Studentroom thread that asked what people thought they would be making? So many £50ks and over and barely saw even a few posts expecting less than 30k. Universities gloss over this too showing only the best student destinations on their "what career can I expect?" pages and not showing the full story that many end up in retail or hospitality. It reflects my anecdotal experience as well, my two younger cousins are expecting 25k to 30k as a first job salary let alone ten years later.

We need to end this fairyland and give students realistic information so they can make informed choices. Such as getting work experience in the summer holidays, getting involved in societies etc.

9k a year for a library subscription fee... its all a bit sad really

...Ten years after graduating university

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/aug/13/quarter-of-graduates-are-low-earners

Thoughts?

I know the usual suspects will say "trololololo should have picked STEM then!!?!" but I think a lot of factors are involved here such as the huge growth in the hospitality/retail service industries which often don't guarantee hours or pay well, lower growth in high skilled industries, the recent economic crisis, amount of people going to university, lack of concrete attractive options post-school.

Things like this make me laugh.

You have all these grads who are earnings average or below average salaries, and have mountains of student debt to repay, and yet they all live this YOLO lifestyle of holidays every 3 months, high-end pricey gadgets and partying every weekend.

If they're trapped in wage slavery they deserve every second of it.

This is me. *Salaries are rubbish in NI anyway but I graduated at the worst possible time. *It also doesn't help that I chose a career path which requires further study, but which I can't afford to pay for due to the aforementioned rubbish salaries. *All stuff I could have known about before going to uni, but didn't because my school gave no careers advice and my family were no help either.

Jaguar is offering a 30k salary after 2 years of training! That's why I'm doing an apprenticeship soon

Tbf, a lot of people on TSR do manage to end up in IB/Law etc, so it's not that unrealistic. But this site has awful sampling bias to prestige obsessed and high achieving students.Posted from TSR Mobile

Exactly, and when you can learn pretty much everything online these days what's the point :/

Would you consider taking your talents elsewhere?

That's true. But it inflates the expectations of lurkers and students reading that who are going for different careers I would say. It certainly did to me back in old 2010. Yet it isn't the reality I didn't realise that the 24k I got was actually a lot for my course when you look at the unistats for my course the average is 17k but that is the side unis and colleges don't talk about.

9k a year for a library subscription fee... its all a bit sad really

That's pathetic. I started at around 40k in consulting (while living in a city way cheaper than London) and felt like I wasn't earning nearly enough for the lifestyle I wanted (and deserved, working 60+ hours a week).

Speak for yourself. I dread to think of the amount of gold I used in my dissertation, not to mention the running of all the equipment, other materials and chemicals, professors time, the amount I printed for free. And that was just my dissertation.

I also only paid £3k, they're not such good value now I admit.