Moneymagpie Team
23rd Jul 2025
Reading Time: 5 minutes
New research by Now Students has revealed which university degrees will net you a high-earning career… and which ones might not launch your work life with such a bang.
Why the ROI of University Courses Matters
University is expensive. So, of course, you want to get your money’s worth!
There are more things to life than earning power… but it can make a big difference. While university courses offer more things than high salary potential, like life skills, social networks, and discovering how to adapt and problem-solve, knowing you could get a decent paying job at the end can help get you through the harder times.
Lowest Earning University Courses
The lowest earning courses are unlikely to be a surprise: university degrees in the creative arts result in the lowest earning potential after graduation.
This, however, is a reflection of the creative arts industries rather than the quality of the degrees themselves. For many creative roles, a degree is necessary – it’s simply the earning potential of theatre, TV, film, art, photography, design and other media is lower overall.
Creative university courses have incredible value if the student has plans to go into the creative arts, or if they are mature students returning to study something they love doing. However, it is worth noting that they are also the degree type that will take the longest to pay off student loans. With the average student debt being £53,000 and the average salary five years after graduating being £32,987, it could take over thirty years to pay off the debt.
It could take so long that the debt is written off.
Highest Earning University Degrees
Once again, this may not come as a surprise! But, apart from the highest earning degrees, many of the degrees in the upper-earnings bracket are in fields which are less competitive and has more demand for graduates (which goes some way to explaining the higher salaries, too). For example, Medicine and Dentistry graduates have a huge 89.3% employment rate.
Technical degrees offer the highest earning potential. Medicine and Dentistry degrees result in an average £54,335 salary after five years, with Mathematical Sciences close behind at £54,328 and Economics coming in at £52,307.
Engineering, Business & Management, Architecture, and Physics & Astronomy degrees all come after, with the average five-year salary being between £43,786 and £46,264.
When comparing these salaries to creative industries, at £32,987 (a difference of £13,277 between this level and the next-lowest average salary), it’s easy to see why people weigh up the ROI of a university course before embarking on the expensive studies.
To put it in perspective, a Dentistry graduate could pay off their £53,000 student debt in about 17.6 years, around half the time it would take a creative graduate.
Debt vs Earning Potential
The figures above are taken as an average of all student debt on graduation. This means courses of three years will result in lower than the average debt and longer courses may have a higher debt. However, the longer courses are also the technical degrees with higher overall earning potential on graduation.
Earning potential should also be considered against the employment regularity of an industry on graduation. One reason the creative arts have lower industry salaries is simply historical: traditionally, most people entering the arts had family or spousal financial support to help them, especially in the early years of their career. But there’s another side to this, too: most industries outside of the arts offer employed jobs, compared to the majority of creative roles being freelance.
The sustainability of a career against earning potential must be taken in the wider picture: a stable income over time as well as higher salaries. When this is taken into account, the gap between student debt and earning potential gets even wider between the creative industries and technical degrees.
Fast Career Ladder University Courses
Some university courses might seem to have mid-range or lower earning prospects when looking at the initial numbers. However, they let graduates quickly climb the career ladder, earning a higher return and bigger year-on-year pay rises than other degrees.
These courses change with business and economic trends. For example, cyber security degrees are very valuable right now, and allow for fast career progression on graduation. A few years ago, those who took degrees centred around developing Artificial Intelligence will now be well ahead of their peers (with huge earning potential). In the future, there could be a drive for more engineers and physics graduates if the world climate turns to one of national defence, in need of both civil and military engineering advances. There may also be a higher demand for Economics graduates as the country (or world!) shifts economic policy to reflect increased digitisation, technology advances, and changing political motives.
While it’s not easy to predict this type of course, it can be one way to find a high-earning potential degree that other people haven’t caught onto yet. Even being a single year ahead of fellow graduates can make all the difference in fast-paced industries such as technology. Looking at trends in business, healthcare, and technology niches can help narrow down which degrees might future-proof a new graduate’s career.
Is the Cost of University Worth It?
University is expensive. There’s no way to avoid that topic: it costs a lot to get a degree in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Even if you are Scottish and attend a university in Scotland, the living costs and bills of getting a degree can be incredibly costly, despite free tuition.
However, a university degree can make a huge impact on your lifetime earning potential. A technical, healthcare, or science-related degree could mean you achieve much higher salaries than your peers, at a faster rate. This makes the ROI of a university course worth the initial debt.
Even in lower earning degrees, like the creative arts, the cost of university can be worth it because of the transferable skills learned and the personal development of a three-year degree. Going to university teaches young adults a lot about life, while being in a transitional institution that can help guide them from the rigid timetables of school and living with parents to being fully-fledged adults living on their own!
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