What Do Graduates Earn? The Starting Salaries and Earnings Prospects of University Graduates 1960–1986

This paper examines the long term pattern of starting and early-career salaries of U.K. university graduates relative to average non-manual earnings. Salary statistics collected by several university careers services are aggregated to create a new data-set which records starting salary trends at aggregate, faculty and subject levels, and data from the 1960,1970 and 1980 graduate cohort surveys are used to extend the investigation to later years. Considerable differences in remuneration across subjects are reported but the paper demonstrates that graduate starting salaries, generally, have been substantially below average non-manual earnings throughout the period since 1960. Further, graduates' relative position has deteriorated over time: whilst at the start of the period graduates six years into their careers could, in most subjects, expect to earn more than the average non-manual wage, by the end of the period, this was no longer generally so. The paper offers an explanation of graduate salary trends, viewing these as the result of changing demand and supply forces in the graduate labour market, and it concludes by addressing some of the key policy and planning issues to which an awareness of salary levels is relevant.