“Choose carefully”: what the government actually said about degrees

For most of the last century the advice was simple: go to university. In June 2026 the Department for Education published analysis that broke with that, telling prospective students to “choose carefully” rather than attend by default.

That is a notable thing for the department that funds the system to say. It is worth reading what the analysis actually claims, because it is more specific than the headlines suggested.

What the data says

The department's figures put the average lifetime graduate premium at around £100,000 after tax and loan repayments. But that average hides an enormous spread.

• The top end Medicine and economics can be worth up to £400,000 over a lifetime.
• The bottom end Some subjects deliver little or no financial return at all, and a few are negative.
• The conclusion Which subject you choose matters more than whether you go.

What it leaves out

A lifetime premium is a comparison against not going. That comparison is the whole game, and it is the part that is hardest to measure — no official statistic records what a given graduate would have earned had they done something else instead.

It also says nothing about the shape of the return. A degree that pays back £100,000 across forty years is a very different proposition from one that pays it back in the first ten, particularly when you are servicing a loan the whole time.

How we model the comparison →

Compare two subjects head to head →

The honest summary

The department is right that subject choice dominates. It is also right that this is now a decision worth running numbers on rather than assuming.

What it cannot tell you is whether you would be any good at the subject, or want to spend a career doing it. Those matter more than any of the above, and no dataset covers them.