LEssOns from LEO


For anyone working in Higher Education, this week was all about LEO. The Longitudinal Educational Outcomes data is a dataset published by the Government which shows graduate earnings 5-years post-graduation by university and subject. This is done by linking data from DfE, DWP and HMRC, so we can piece together a student’s university degree and institution with their future employment and tax return data. While there are some gaps in this analysis, overall it’s not too shabby.
Some have posited that this data will transform higher education, allowing prospective students to make more informed decisions about where to study based by identifying the course that will return most for their investments. Others think it should be largely disregarded – the data is historical rather than predictive of future earnings, and other things matter beyond money. 
Either way, now that the data is out, it will be hard for prospective students – and their parents - to ignore it. And some of the findings are pretty difficult to ignore. Here are my top three.

Mind the (gender) gap
On average, male earnings are greater than female earnings for all subjects across universities – English being the one exception. This gender gap is clearly true 5 years after graduation, but also after just one year – a rather disappointing statistic. Gender differences in salaries after just one year suggest that the “women take time out to have children which impacts career progression” argument doesn’t hold. I suspect it indicates some manifest gender bias in recruitment practices and initial salary levels[1]. 
Also interesting to note is that the gender difference is worst for Nursing, joint with Medicine and Dentistry - for those subject areas, at 94% of higher education institutions, men earn more than women 5 years post graduating. Given nursing is traditionally conceived as a more female-dominated field, I find this a particularly striking result. But the same holds true for Education too, another field with a high proportion of female employees (approx. 75%). I think this sheds light on the fact that even when equality – or even bias towards women – might be seen in workforce representation, it may not convert to equality in economic terms. 
 

If only I’d studied _______ I’d be a billionaire
The upper quartile of those who study economics at LSE earn £120,900 on average. Unless that is you dear reader, I imagine that makes for quite an eye-wateringly high number. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking “That could have been me! Why did I choose to study History at the University of Greenwich which has an upper quartile earning of £26,700?! Think what I could do with an extra £99,000 a year!”
But that kind of thinking is completely pointless. For most people, a lot about university and degree choice is already defined – A-level subject choices; passions and interests; geography; parent, teacher and peer influences. So thinking “that could have been me!” is broadly unhelpful, because more often than not, it could not. However subjective the university applications process is, very few people could win a place to study a subject they know nothing about and have no interest in at a university they don’t want to go to.
This is one reason why I do not think LEO will revolutionise prospective students’ choices. The real takeaway from the LEO data is that there is more similarity than difference - both in terms of earnings by institution and by subject - so at the stage of choosing universities or courses, it’s unlikely that this data and decision will hugely sway average income either way. Most students will be choosing between a narrow range of degrees and institutions in broadly the same ballpark, defined by their previous life choices and circumstance. 


Data quirks and difficult questions
If you study a Creative Arts degree at the University of Birmingham or Bournemouth you will likely earn more after graduating than if you study at Royal Academy of Music or Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Drama – arguably more prestigious establishments. In some analysis I’ve seen, this is thrown up as a question over whether prestigious institutions really give a better education. However I think there are possible explanations for this data aside from that. Acting, music, theatre are all notoriously competitive professions. If roles get snapped up by candidates from more prestigious institutions (whether due to greater talent, better training, or just the name on the CV), graduates from other universities may end up working in higher-paying sectors not related to their degree. On a purely monetary level, the studied-drama-working-in-finance student looks to have had better “value for money” from their degree than the studied-drama-low-paid-actor. However, if they both really wanted to be actors, arguably the one now working in finance got very little from their degree at all. 
This is the second reason I do not think LEO will revolutionise student choices. In focusing on graduate salaries it runs the risk of condensing the “value” of a degree to a single monetary factor. In reality, students go to university for a range of reasons beyond increasing prospects for employment and future earnings. And university degrees confer other goods - cognitive skills, academic fulfilment, personal enjoyment, social opportunities – which are also valuable in their own right. So while the LEO data is all very interesting, I hope it is used by students, universities and policy-makers alike with a wide-lensed view of university, employment and “value”.  
[1] I thought it might result from different degree classes achieved by men and women, but ruled this out as men are actually less likely to get a 2.1 or above than women (69% vs. 73%).  





[i] All figures in this have been taken directly from the LEO data set which can be accessed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/graduate-outcomes-for-all-subjects-by-university. Happy data crunching! All graphs have been taken from the Gov report which can be accessed on the same page.

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