Graduate pay gap between top universities and ex-polys

Graduate pay gap between top universities and ex-polys

A person's earning power is tightly linked to the university they attended, with graduates from the "top" institutions four times more likely to be among the highest earners than those from former polytechnics, according to research.

State schools are failing to encourage pupils to apply to leading universities, relying too much on contacts with local institutions, research published by the Sutton Trust charity finds.

A fifth of people (19%) who graduated from elite universities in the 1990s are now earning more than £90,000 a year, compared with only 5% of those who went to former polytechnics, and 8% of those who went to other "old" universities.

Researchers at the University of London's Institute of Education surveyed graduates who left university in the mid-1990s. Elite universities included Bristol, Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Imperial College London, King's College London, London School of Economics, Oxford, St Andrews, and University College London. Some 33% of the graduates from elite universities now own their home outright, compared with 21% of graduates from other universities and 13% of non-graduates, they found.

A separate survey commissioned by the trust found widespread ignorance about the earning premium attached to degrees from certain universities. Among 3,000 young people, 51% of those educated in state schools and 35% of those from independent schools believed there is no difference in earnings between higher education.....continued below

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institutions.

Only a tiny minority of state schools managed to send significant numbers of students to top universities. Researchers struggled to find schools with high rates of applications to elite universities and high numbers of pupils on free school meals. Previous studies by the Sutton trust found that 100 schools, four-fifths from the private sector, account for nearly a third of all UK undergraduates starting at Oxbridge.

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