It came as a relief to many last month when the arrangements for the postgraduate loan were finally made clear. For those looking to begin postgraduate courses this September, up to £10,000 in loans will be made available, making Master’s degrees and PhDs possible for many who have, until now, been prevented for financial reasons.
Gaining further qualifications after your undergraduate degree can be a powerful way to improve your career prospects, giving you a significant advantage over other candidates. This news is likely to encourage more students than ever to consider how further study might benefit them.
However, further study remains a substantial commitment of time, intellectual effort and money. While the introduction of this loan means that students will not have to source funding independently, and only repay the loan once their salary reaches the £21,000 threshold, the financial investment should be carefully considered against the potential for the desired outcome.
TheJobCrowd has examined the career destinations of undergraduate and postgraduate university leavers to investigate how their level of qualification affected their employability and salary across various sectors. We hope that the following findings are useful in determining whether pursuing a Master’s degree or PhD is the right choice.
- Sectors in which employees with only an undergraduate degree, rather than a Master’s degree and/or a PhD comprise the highest and lowest levels of their total graduate employee intake are as follows:
- The most important factors affecting an undergraduate leaver’s choice of career sector are highly similar for Master’s-level and doctorate-level employees, with the prospect for ‘Enjoyable and Challenging Work’ and opportunities for career progression being the most powerful factors in each case. There are clear exceptions to this: while the chance to work internationally is the least important factor for undergraduate leavers, this increases among Master’s degree leavers to 23%, making it the fourth most important factor, whereas employees with PhDs 10% less interested in an employer’s training provision than graduates at lower levels.
- The significance of earning a higher salary decreases as graduates are educated at a higher level, since salary was cited as an important contributing factor to graduates’ choice of employers by 25% of those with an undergraduate degree, 19% of those with a Master’s degree and 15% of those with PhDs.