Introduction
This publication presents a time series of graduates, postgraduates, and non-graduates' employment and salaries living in England from 2007 to 2023.
For information on data processing and data quality of these statistics, please see the methodology note.
Previous publications on graduate employment and earnings
The Department for Education (DfE) and other bodies have previously published research on the absolute, and lifetime returns to undergraduate degrees. For more detailed econometric analysis of the earnings and employment differentials between graduates and non-graduates, please see the links below:
- The returns to undergraduate degrees by socio-economic group and ethnicity (opens in a new tab)
- The impact of undergraduate degrees on early-career earnings (opens in a new tab)
- Undergraduate degrees: lifetime labour market returns (opens in a new tab)
- The impact of university degrees on the lifecycle of earnings: some further analysis (opens in a new tab)
The DfE also publish other statistics on graduate employment and earnings; LEO graduate and postgraduate outcomes.
Data source
Statistics presented in this publication use data from the Office for National Statistics' (ONS) Labour Force Survey (LFS). ONS have faced challenges around the falling number of responses to the LFS which has led to increased sampling variability.
ONS expect to see improvements to response levels and rates due the reintroduction of face-to-face interviews and a sample boost in October 2023 and January 2024, respectively. However, as these improvements will take time to materialise in the LFS data, LFS statistics will be badged as "official statistics in development" until further review.
As the results presented in these publications are based on survey data, they represent estimates. Individual estimates may be inaccurate reflections of the true population, and differences between estimates may not be statistically significant.
Coverage
In this publication, graduate type is defined as follows:
- Graduates are people whose highest qualification is an undergraduate degree at Bachelor’s level;
- Postgraduates are those holding a higher degree (such as a Master’s or PhD) as their highest qualification;
- Non-graduates are those whose highest qualification is below undergraduate level, i.e. National Qualification Framework Level 5 or below (see methodology note for more details).
All earnings data in this publication are calculated for full-time workers only and are rounded to the nearest £500. Difference between groups (such as the graduate premium) are calculated from unrounded data.
Information on part-time employment patterns for graduates and non-graduates are also included. For these groups, part-time workers’ employment outcomes are broken down by age group and gender.
Caveats
Please note there have been methodological changes for the 2023 publication, including amendments to the classification of graduate type and categorising Chinese ethnicity as ‘Asian or Asian British’ as opposed to previously grouping in ‘Other ethnic group’ (see methodology note for more details).
The employment and earnings outcomes for 2020 and 2021 should be viewed against the backdrop of the significant adverse shock to the UK macroeconomy due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic which severely disrupted business activity in many sectors of the UK economy.
This publication only provides simple outcome measures based on survey data and does not control for the differences in characteristics between graduates, postgraduates, and non-graduates. This means that the outcomes reported may not be wholly attributable to the fact that an individual holds a particular qualification, but instead could reflect other factors, such as their skills, experience, or geographic location.