Top university gives no significant earnings boost to male students over peers without degree

The University of Glasgow has called the government figures ‘misleading’

Male students at a top university receive hardly any boost to their future earnings compared with peers who chose to avoid higher education altogether, government figures suggest.

The University of Glasgow, a member of the Russell Group which represents the most selective universities in the UK, makes no significantly positive returns for male attendees, the data finds.

It comes as Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) research shows one in three male students attend an institution that gives them no significant advantage in terms of salary over their non-graduate peers.

Full data from the Department for Education, who commissioned the report, shows that studying a degree at the University of Glasgow would only see a return of just over zero for men.

However, on average, the majority of Russell Group universities still tend to have very high returns after controlling for background characteristics, the IFS analysis found.

According to the government data, the higher education institution (HEI) with the worst returns for women is the University of Bolton at -10 per cent, and for men it is Leeds City at -22 per cent.

Meanwhile, the university offering the greatest returns for both men and women is the London School of Economics with 99 per cent and 62 per cent respectively.

The data focuses on the earnings of those who took their GCSEs in England between 2002 and 2007 and then attended university – compared with their peers with no experience of higher education.

A spokesperson for the University of Glasgow said: “The statistics provided are extremely misleading. Glasgow’s relatively low figure for estimated returns for male HEI grads at age 29 is related to the noticeably small number of observations that the result is based upon.”

They added: “The IFS study uses GCSE result information from the national pupil database, which focuses on students schooled in England.

“Glasgow attracts a smaller proportion of students who attended school in England and this is borne out in the data – the Glasgow figure in the IFS study is based on only 62 observations, compared with an average of 730 observations at other Russell Group universities.”