Critics of higher education often complain that universities offer too many worthless degrees with little value in the workplace. Since top universities tend to produce higher-earning graduates than less selective institutions do, you might expect them to teach more practical courses. Yet data from Britain's department for education show the opposite. Undergraduate students at leading universities are more likely to study purely academic fields such as philosophy and classics, whereas those at less choosy ones tend to pick career-related topics such as business or nursing.
What could explain this seeming contradiction? One reason is that employers treat a degree from a top university as an indicator of intelligence. This means that students at top institutions can study bookish subjects and still get by financially. The average Cambridge graduate in a creative-arts subject - tho university's least profitable group of courses, including fields such as music - earns around £25, 000 ($32, 400) at age 26. Economics students from less well-known universities, such as Hull, make a similar amount.
Yet even though Oxbridge students can pretend to read "Ulysses" for years and still expect a decent salary, they end up paying a large opportunity cost by pursuing the arts. That is because employers reserve the highest starting wages for students who both attended a leading university and also studied a marketable subject. Cambridge creative-arts graduates earn £11, 000 more at age 26 than do those from Wrexham Glyndwr University, whose arts graduates are the lowest-earning in Britain. In contrast, Cambridge economics graduates make £44, 000 more than those from the University of Salford, where the economics course is the country's least profitable.
Many gifted arts students would struggle to deal with numbers. But for those who can manage both, the cost of sticking with the arts, in terms of future wages, is steep. Cambridge creative-arts students have A-level scores close to those of economics students at Warwick, but earn about half as much. That is equal to giving up an annual income worth £50, 000.
