How much does degree choice matter?

Britton, Jack and Erve, Laura van der and Belfield, Chris and Vignoles, Anna and Dickson, Matt and Zhu, Yu and Walker, Ian and Dearden, Lorraine and Sibieta, Luke and Buscha, Franz (2022) How much does degree choice matter? Labour Economics, 79: 102268. ISSN 0927-5371

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Abstract

We use a large and novel administrative dataset to investigate returns to different university ‘degrees’ (subject-institution combinations) in the United Kingdom. Conditioning on a rich set of background characteristics, we find substantial variation in returns across degrees with similar selectivity levels, suggesting students’ degree choices matter a lot for later-life earnings. Returns increase with university selectivity much more at the top of the selectivity distribution than further down, and much more for some subjects than others. Returns are poorly correlated with observable degree characteristics other than selectivity, which could have important implications for student choices and the incentives of universities.