The unis you should have gone to if you wanted to earn more than Russell Group grads

Everyone hypes the Russell Group. Never mind that it’s a self-selecting research group of unis, or named after a hotel. It’s prestigious, synonymous with the country’s top unis. It matters to your dad, essentially. And it’s where you go if you want to earn big bucks. But what if there was a way to earn more money by not going to one of these unis?

We’ve crunched some numbers from HESA’s graduate outcome survey, which charts the fortunes of 2018 grads who’ve made it into full-time employment.

And yes, plenty of Russell Group unis are high earning – Imperial grads are more likely than grads from anywhere else to earn over £30k, while Oxford, Cambridge, and LSE are hard to beat.

But, by the law of averages, a degree from one of the following unis is more likely to earn you over £30k than a degree from a randomly-chosen Russell Group uni.

These are the unis you should have gone to if you wanted to earn more than Russell Group grads:

We’ve listed unis where the percentage of grads earning over £30k was higher than the average percentage (21.3 per cent) for the Russell Group.

1. The Royal Veterinary College – 64.52 per cent

2. St George’s, University of London – 48.65 per cent

3. The University of Bath – 47.69 per cent

4. The Open University – 42.68 per cent

5. Birkbeck College – 37.84 per cent

6. Loughborough University – 33.33 per cent

7. The University of Aberdeen – 32.94 per cent

8. The University of Strathclyde – 29.67 per cent

9. The University of St Andrews – 28.79 per cent

10. London South Bank University – 28.47 per cent

11. Glyndŵr University – 28.13 per cent

12. The University of Surrey – 27.78 per cent

13. Aston University – 27.61 per cent

14. The University of Dundee – 27.56 per cent

15. Brunel University London – 26.79 per cent

16. The University of Greenwich – 26.34 per cent

17. The University of Leicester – 25.33 per cent

18. University of the Highlands and Islands – 25.00 per cent

19. City, University of London – 25.00 per cent

20 .The Robert Gordon University – 24.41 per cent

21 .The University of Lancaster – 22.90 per cent

22. Staffordshire University – 22.48 per cent

23. Heriot-Watt University – 21.84 per cent

Only unis with over 100 grads included in the HESA data was used, as HESA stats are rounded to the nearest five, which can distort smaller totals.

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