The Guardian has revealed that the Government plans to rank universities in the United Kingdom by graduate salary. 

The contested proposal comes after the current Conservative government announced they plan to address the problem of low earning university courses.

The ranking system would see the removal of courses that do not give graduates sufficient earning prospects.

Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy institution told The Week that, ‘When Ofsted goes into a school it judges whether it is a good or bad school based on what is happening there. It doesn’t say we think this is a bad school because kids who have been here in the past have got bad jobs. That is how universities will be judged.’

Concerns have emerged that these measures could significantly damage humanities courses, that are traditionally lower earning than vocational subjects such as Medicine and Engineering.

Professor Alec Cameron, vice-chancellor of Aston University in Birmingham said ‘Salary is evidence of things, including where you live, what sector you’re in, and what sort of job you are pursuing. We should push back against the idea that a good salary is an adequate measure of how much a job matters to society.’ 

Universities in less economically prosperous locations could also face being affected. Statistics from Luminate show that graduate salary, aside from course studied, is also subject to the location of the graduate job. Graduates working in London are likely to earn £24,991 on average, whereas in the West Midlands area, this figure stands at £21,585.

In response to criticisms raised regarding the measures, The Department for Education said, ‘the government subsidies around 50% of the cost of higher education and it is only fair that this funding is used as efficiently as possible, so students can be confident they are getting good value for money.’ 

The Government has also revealed that they plan to use the data to work in collaboration with the Office for Students. Courses which offer reduced earning prospects could risk being abolished from the Office for Students register.

The plans have led people to draw comparisons with the Teaching excellence framework (TEF), released in 2017. The Guardian highlighted that, ‘Some of the UK’s leading universities failed to get the top gold rating, with the London School of Economics being awarded only a bronze.’