THE CAREERS ISSUE: Does your studying pay off?

Our deputy finance editor, Chiara Castrovillari, asks if degrees with heavy workloads mean more money.

Many students in Warwick have probably already started thinking about their dream job and how to get there. For different people this means different things – for some the dream job is relaxed working hours and enough time to enjoy life, for others this is travelling the globe, or following a particular passion. Whatever qualities students look for in a future career, it is almost impossible to omit the weight of a paycheck from the scales.

Whether money was a worry when you applied for your course or not, it probably has become after attending all those careers events and struggling to get internships.

Hopefully students feel rewarded by the enjoyment of their course and intellectual stimulation. Still – when handing in the third assignment in three weeks, you cannot escape thinking ‘will this pay off?’

In what we take to be a meritocratic system, hard work should pay off- but it doesn’t seem to do so proportionally.

High Fliers research estimates the average starting salary for graduates in 2016 to be £30,000 according to data from The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers.

The Boar Finance has collected information about contact hours for various degrees which would usually allow access into the sectors of the job market with the highest graduate salaries so that students can roughly see how much work they need to put in for a degree that will give them an above national average salary.

Contact hours are by far not a perfect measure of work load or difficulty, but they can give an indication.

The average starting salary for an investment banker is the highest reported at £47,000 and Banking and Finance offered the third highest salary, £36,000, in 2015. Anyone hoping to pursue a career in these fields must have basic economic, mathematical and financial knowledge at the least, so degrees such as Economics, EPAIS, Accounting & Finance, Business, Management or Mathematics would open the doors to the high starting salaries entailed.

Whilst Management, PPE, PAIS and Accounting&Finance at Warwick require overall similar contact hours, around 15, the average for Mathematics is closer to 18-22. The second highest salary yielding degree is Law for which contact hours can range between 12-14, preceding jobs in sectors requiring more technical and specific knowledge such as Oil&Energy, IT and Armed Forces.

Degrees which would be valuable in these sectors include Sociology and Global Sustainable Development (22 contact hours), Computer Science and Business (17 contact hours), Engineering (16) or Chemistry (15 contact hours). Sociology and Global Sustainable Development as well as Computer Science and Business students have significantly more contact hours than Social Sciences students which would be able to access the highest graduate salaries. Still, their fields are in the top ten highest paying industries for graduates.

There is still another factor to consider when judging how much hard work will pay off: what kind of possibility you have at actually getting such a high salary.

Social Science and Busines & Finance degrees, provide broader knowledge and skills, for example have a lot more avenues for employment between marketing, management, accounting, consulting, banking, stock broking – to name a few. Out of the top 10 sectors with the highest graduate salaries, with a Social Science degree you could get into 5; investment banking, banking and finance, consulting, accounting and professional services and consumer goods.

However, the chance of getting an ‘above average’ starting salary also depends on the extent of graduate employment in different fields.

Although practicing law or working in the oil&energy industry will pay better in the first year than IT, there are more vacancies for graduates in IT, 972 last year, than the former two.

Accounting and Professional services take the lead as the most extensive graduate employer, hiring 4,686 graduates in 2015, followed by Investment Banking in third place (1,906) and Engineering in fourth (1,568).

Last year, the three industries employing the least amount of graduates were Media, Consumer Goods and Oil&Energy with only the latter two offering salaries high enough to be considered among the top ten paying fields.

If your driving force is the future value of your contact hours, be wary of the ‘work hard, play hard’ motto.