Why a ‘rip-off’ degree might be worth the money after all – research study

Certain university degrees – especially in the arts and humanities – are often maligned as “rip-offs” or “Mickey Mouse degrees”. The argument is that while some degrees lead to high-paying jobs, others offer little financial return and may leave graduates worse off than if they hadn’t gone to university.

Financial returns are important, and prospective students should understand the cost implications of different degrees. This is a particularly vital consideration when recent reports suggest that the graduate premium – the boost in earnings that comes from having a degree – may be faltering, with some degrees particularly implicated.

But part of making an informed decision also means understanding how degrees shape graduates’ early experiences of work. That’s where our research comes in.

The research study I carried out with colleagues explores this broader view of graduate success. We analysed responses from UK graduates who finished university in 2018-19, surveyed 15 months after graduation through the national Graduate Outcomes survey. This gave us a sample size of over 67,500 graduates.

Rather than focusing on salary, we looked at how graduates responded to three simple but telling questions:

1) Do you find your work meaningful?

2) Does it align with your future plans?

3) Are you using the skills you learned at university?

Our results challenge the idea that only high-earning degrees offer value. While some vocational courses – such as medicine, veterinary science, and education – perform especially well on these measures, graduates across all subjects reported largely positive experiences. In fact, 86% said their work felt meaningful, 78% felt on track with their careers, and 66% said they were using their university-acquired skills.

This matters because public debate has long been dominated by a single metric: income. While earnings are undoubtedly an important outcome of higher education, they’re not the only one.

Many would trade a higher salary for work that offers purpose and uses their talents. These aren’t just “touchy-feely” concerns: they’re key drivers of employee retention, productivity, and competitiveness.

Vocational and generalist degrees

Graduates of medicine and dentistry were around 12 percentage points more likely than others to say their work was meaningful, and more than 30 points more likely to say they were using their university-acquired skills. Education, allied health, and veterinary science also performed well.

But generalist degrees – including many of those that have been labelled “low value” – held their own. History, languages, and the creative arts all produced graduates who, on average, felt positively about their work. Once we adjusted for background factors like social class, gender, and prior attainment, many of the gaps between vocational and generalist fields narrowed.

Graduates of generalist degrees, such as languages and history, also felt positive about their careers. Atthapon Niyom/Shutterstock

Crucially, we found little support for the idea that certain degrees routinely leave students disillusioned. Even in subjects like history or media studies, often targeted in value-for-money debates, the data show a more positive picture than the headlines suggest.

Of course, our study has limitations. It captures only the first 15 months after graduation, which are still early days for recent graduates. It also doesn’t track income or job stability over the longer term. But it provides something previously missing from the debate: nationally representative evidence on how UK graduates across different degree subjects experience their early careers.

And the findings are striking. Many of the most heavily criticised degrees consistently deliver positive subjective outcomes for their graduates. This challenges the idea that the arts, humanities, and social sciences are bad investments, for individuals or for society.

More than financial returns

Our findings prompt broader questions about how value in higher education should be defined. Framing only high-earning degrees as “worth it” reduces university study to a financial transaction.

It risks sending the message that choosing a subject based on personal interest, talent, or intellectual curiosity is a mistake, and may deter students from pursuing degrees that, while less lucrative, often lead to fulfilling and meaningful work.

Yes, graduates should be employable. And yes, some degrees deliver clearer financial returns than others. But higher education is also about developing individual potential, nurturing intellectual curiosity, and enabling people to make meaningful contributions to society beyond just income. If we ignore these dimensions, we risk undervaluing not just certain degrees, but the wider purpose of education itself.

By branding arts and humanities degrees as “rip-offs”, we risk further weakening the talent pipeline for one of the UK’s genuinely world-leading sectors — arts and culture. This sector is already facing skills shortages following years of cuts to creative education.

So, before we write off a subject as a rip-off, we should ask: what are we really measuring? Because for many university graduates, we now have credible evidence that success is about more than just a pay packet.