So, more than 600,000 graduates are on benefits – says the Daily Telegraph (The Times did a quick follow-up too).

The source of both is Shadow Minister for Policy Renewal and Development Neil O’Brien. The serial writer of think-tank reports asked a Written Question towards the end of the last parliamentary term:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what information his Department holds on the number and what proportion of Universal Credit claimants who have (a) no qualifications, (b) Level 2 qualifications, (c) Level 3 qualifications, (d) Level 4 qualifications, (e) Level 5 qualifications and (f) Level 6 qualifications or above.

The response ended up coming from Acting National Statistician Emma Rourke, under the auspices of the UK Statistics Authority.

The whole thing could be read as a handy demonstration of the values of administrative data matching. You would think, perhaps, that as the government has a list of people who are currently claiming Universal Credit (which it uses to allocate UC to the right people) and a list of people who had been to university (which it uses to allocate fee and maintenance loans, and possibly even run the Lifelong Learning Entitlement) that we could do a simple “how many in the left-hand circle are also in the right-hand circle” exercise and get a reasonably definitive answer.

We apparently can’t.

Instead, we reach for the Office for National Statistics’ Labour Force Survey (LFS). This is, as we’ve been over on the site before, a sample-based survey carried out every three months. We don’t yet have information for the March to May 2025 slice, but the response rate for the previous quarter (January to March) was an unimpressive 21.3 per cent. To be scrupulously fair, this is a recovery of sorts (we got down as low as 12.7 per cent in 2023), but the continuing low rate (it used to be around 50 per cent) mean that these are no longer (gold standard) Official Statistics.

As the acting national statistician put it:

The ongoing challenges with response rates, response levels and weighting approach mean that labour market statistics based on the LFS are subject to increased volatility and are considered ’official statistics in development’ until further review

It’s for this reason that the Department of Education is cancelling the production of Graduate Labour Market Statistics (GLMS), which are based on the same survey responses.

GLMS doesn’t capture information about access to Universal Credit, but it does offer us some interesting data points (caveats as above). For all graduates (up to the age of 64) in 2024 the employment rate was 87.6 per cent (90 per cent for postgraduates), and the high-skilled employment rate was 67.9 per cent (79 per cent for postgraduates). There’s also data on salary levels – the median salary (in 2024 prices) was £42,000 (compare £47,000 for postgraduates and £30,500 for non-graduates). Of course, these salary variations are affected by other factors (age, industry, region, sex, prior attainment, disability…) but it is abundantly clear that graduates (as a group of people who have a degree-level qualification) tend to earn more than their peers.

So, if the median salary of graduates is around £42,000 – why are so many claiming Universal Credit?

So we don’t actually know that 600,000 graduates are claiming that benefit. We know that the proportion of people in the survey sample (after the various statistical processes have been carried out to make it nationally representative) who tell us they are claiming Universal Credit who also claim to have a level six qualification is 11.6 per cent. And if we run the maths, 11.6 per cent of UC claimants is something like 639,000.

That sounds like a big number, but it does not mean that we would be able to find 639,000 graduates in the UK claiming Universal Credit. Even so, we want to put that number in context – it is oddly hard to get good data on the number of graduates in the UK, but the 2021 Census (a survey with a vastly higher response rate) tells us that there are 16,413,231 people in the UK with qualifications at level 4 (equivalent to the first year of an undergraduate, but as there are so few L4 and L5 qualifications it is fair to assume most of these are graduates or reasonably equivalent) and above.

It may surprise you to learn that the Level 4 and above bucket is by far the largest one in our population – more than 33 per cent of people for whom the question of a highest qualification is an applicable one ticked that box in the census. If graduates were equally likely to claim UC as anyone else, we would expect a similar proportion (our LFS release tells us that the proportion of people who said they claimed Universal Credit and had level 4 and above qualifications was 20.7 per cent).

The other big thing we need to get our heads around is what Universal Credit actually is.

UC replaced six benefits related to low income (housing benefit, jobseekers allowance, income-related employment and support allowance, income support, working tax credit, child tax credit). Something like a third of UC claimants are in work.

It’s a huge scheme and the very nature of it means that eligibility is quite complex – for example you need to claim as a couple if you live together, and if one partner works and the other does not then the working partner can “claim” despite having what you might consider a reasonable salary. For this reason, talking about the number of individuals that claim UC is not always helpful.

People move on and off UC as their circumstances change – but the important thing to be aware of is that claiming UC does not mean that someone is unemployed or in a bad job. If you are on UC in any given month, it means that for any given month your household income dipped below the relevant work allowance (there are many, depending on circumstance). This could relate to a change in the number of hours you work, a period between jobs, a change in your partner’s earnings, a long-term illness, a period spent caring for family, or many other factors.

Fundamentally UC and other employment related benefits deal with low household income – supporting people who are either not employed, or earning little. The principal need is based around low pay, and there are many employers who simply are not paying people enough to have a reasonable standard of living. There are nurses and classroom assistants who claim Universal Credit. There are local government employees who claim Universal Credit. There are post-doctoral researchers on precarious contracts who claim Universal Credit.

Stories like this perpetuate a stigma over low pay and periods between employment. Other sensible European countries don’t get so (apologies) worked up about income support for the low paid, and ask sensible questions about why employers are able to pay so little rather than talking about “skivers”, “scroungers”, or the “workshy” in banner headlines.

So, there probably aren’t more than 600,000 graduates on Universal Credit. If there were, this would be a low proportion of the total number of graduates in the UK, and would reflect rapidly changing personal circumstances in an uncertain economy. It doesn’t really tell us anything about the value of a degree, but it does tell us that the UK has a problem with low pay more generally.