Want that top-paying job? Take a degree in geology
GEOLOGY is the UK’s most lucrative degree thanks to a glut of highly paid jobs in the oil and nuclear industries, figures reveal.
Graduates from Imperial College London’s geology course earn the best starting salaries, averaging £73,267 a year six months after leaving.
This surpasses the starting wages of most doctors and engineers and means these graduates earn half the Prime Minister’s salary while still in their early 20s.
Geology is a sought-after qualification for firms involved in oil and gas recovery.
Many science graduates from Imperial College London also end up taking highly paid jobs in banking.
In contrast, the least lucrative course in the country is psychology at Liverpool Hope University, with new graduates earning around £12,343 – less than half the average UK salary of £27,600.
The findings, revealed in the Sunday Times Good Universities Guide, come as the Department for Education pushes for more salary data to be made available for university applicants amid criticism that some degrees have poor job prospects and are not good value for money.
The rankings showed computer science and business studies graduates, favoured by technology companies such as Google, also tend to earn good salaries.
And in contrast to many parents’ expectations, some modern universities such as Leeds Trinity and De Montfort in Leicester are producing some of the best-paid graduates in the country.
The computer science course at De Montfort is tenth in the earnings rankings, with new graduates getting an average of £39,129, while business studies at Leeds Trinity is fourth, with earnings at £58,220.
Oxford, Cambridge and the London School of Economics also dominate the top ten.
Mary Curnock Cook, of the universities admissions service Ucas, said: ‘Courses in new universities often lead to lucrative careers.’ She added that some offered ‘very specialised courses where students learn very specific skills… and they have high employment rates’.
Alan Smithers, a professor of edu-
‘They risk wasting their money’
cation at Buckingham University, said: ‘The new universities have not been able to challenge the traditional universities in the main subject areas like law, so they have had to look for new opportunities. This has made some of them more responsive to the employment market and you can see that success in some of their courses.’
Ben Lawton, 22, graduated from Leeds Trinity last year after founding a company making gaming controllers while studying. Custom Controllers is the leading UK manufacturer of the controllers, with a turnover of £500,000 last year.
In contrast, many graduates who chose subjects and universities at the bottom of the salaries table are struggling to find work or earn less than the minimum wage equivalent of just over £13,500 a year.
Shannon Steele, 24, who graduated from Liverpool Hope with a psychology degree, works in a Belfast delicatessen on the minimum wage. She told The Sunday Times: ‘I studied for three years and I came out assuming it would be easy to get a job but it’s not.’
Professor Smithers said students paying £9,000 a year in fees ‘should think carefully… and study the differences in salaries between courses if that is important to them, otherwise they risk wasting their money’.