Wish you knew what you might earn as a graduate from a given course at a given university? Wish no more!
Good news, everyone. I’ve tracked down that top secret data on the link between university courses and average graduate earnings.
It’s not a place that many people look for anything, but the government has hidden it on a little-known website called Discover Uni.
With persistence, and application, and an almost cavalier disregard for the rule book, you can get this site to show you graduate earnings (both an overall average, and a typical range) after 15 months, three years, and five years for any course currently on offer at any provider in the UK.
It’s not universal, of course. Some courses haven’t been running long enough to generate enough data to show – others have produced too little data to be able to publish anything meaningful. The data that is available is presented alongside sector information on similar courses, and wider details of graduate destinations and perceptions. Discover Uni also has employment rates and non-completion rates for pretty much every course.
Also: it’s not for the faint of heart, but the source data for this site is available in a machine-readable format for you to do your own analysis (pro-tip, you’re going to have to roll your own identifiers by combining the base UKPRN, provider course code, and mode code).
There’s also a bunch of LEO data available from the Department for Education. Again, it is well hidden (you have to search for “LEO data”) but I’m not afraid to spill the beans here. You are probably most interested in the graduate and postgraduate outcomes (this is the most recent release) by provider – and a few clicks will lead you to a spreadsheet. Really they could have made more of an effort to hide it.
It’s a release that’s kept me busy playing with dashboards over the years – so here’s the most recent one of these. The charts at the bottom are probably of the most immediate interest to the casual reader: you can see a ranked list of providers by subject area showing earnings one, three, five, or ten years after graduation.
And because we know a lot of things other than your choice of subject or course can affect earnings, you can also look only at graduates with a particular ethnicity, sex, POLAR4 quintile, or prior attainment marker. So we can keep to a sensible number of graduates in each group at each provider, the resolution of the subject area is a bit lower in the chart right at the bottom.
It’s not just me that mucks about with LEO data. Famously, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has published numerous reports that use LEO and a range of other techniques to think about graduate earnings, subject, and provider. As with all such attempts, past data is not a perfect indicator of future earnings success – but it makes for fascinating reading.
All LEO data shows a median, upper quartile, and lower quartile. That’s some fancy language for the middle of the range of earnings, the seventy-five percent line, and the twenty-five per cent line. A handy rule of thumb is that the bottom 25 per cent of graduate earners earn less than the lower quartile, the top 25 per cent of graduates earn more than the upper quartile, and the remaining 50 per cent are between the two – with the median marking the mid-point (as many graduates earn more than the median as earn less).
If you had anonymised individualised data, calculating quartiles and a median would be the first thing you would do – given the amount of things that can have an impact on graduate earnings looking at just one graduate is almost useless. By publishing these boundaries instead of anonymised data DfE makes LEO easier to use and understand.
There’s no curation of the data other than the fact that DfE doesn’t publish data that would pertain to really small groups of people. It wouldn’t be statistically meaningful to do so.
I hope this has been useful to the “looking for growth” team, and I wish you every success with your campaign to ensure that Barnet FC can once again play in Barnet.