If you wanted to earn more than Russell Group grads, you should’ve gone to these unis

Still won’t beat the London unis though


The Russell Group unis get plenty of hype, and rightly so. They’re prestigious and won’t let you forget it – be it the aptly named uni building or the posh alumni flooding out left, right and centre.

If you want to earn the big bucks then a Russell Group uni is probably the place for you. But what if you could earn even more than the arrogant Russell Group uni grads by going somewhere else? Well turns out there’s a select few unis in the country where you can.

We’ve analysed some numbers from HESA’s graduate outcome survey, which charts the fortunes of 2019 grads who’ve made it into full-time employment.

And yes, plenty of Russell Group unis are high earning – over 75 per cent of Imperial grads earn £30,000 and above. Yep, 75 per cent. The other London uni’s are pretty hard to beat too.

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 (33.6 per cent) for the Russell Group.

1. The Royal Veterinary College – 55.88 per cent

2.  St George’s, University of London – 51.92 per cent

3. Birkbeck College – 50.00 per cent

4. University of Bath – 43.72 per cent

5. The Open University – 38.08 per cent

6. London South Bank University – 33.90 per cent

Unfortunately only six unis make the cut – a huge decrease from when we did this story last year and the Russell Group average was only 21.3 per cent. That means the average of Russell Group grads earning over £30k has jumped by over 12 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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