Need a hug? These are the uni degrees which produce the most miserable grads

Going to uni is repeatedly referred to as the best time of your life. And most of the time the people telling you this are just plain old miserable in their shitty nine-to-five job longing for their uni days when they went out four times a week, lived off pesto pasta and lived with their best mates.

But does the degree you do actually have an impact on how miserable you might end up after graduating? We all know there are certain degrees which allow you to earn much more money, but what about happiness?

Well, consultancy firm PwC analysed data from over 84,000 graduates who graduated in the last 10 years. The grads were asked to rate their current well-being on a scale of one to ten with one being not at all satisfied with life and 10 being completely satisfied. The results were controlled for age, sex, health, religion and nationality.

Of the 35 degrees studied, 28 of them were found to have a positive impact on the grads’ lives with graduates for eight courses reporting feeling less happy after completing their degrees.

They also surveyed 62,000 grads on their earnings post-university and found a general positive correlation between the grads’ salaries and how happy they described themselves as.

Students who studied creative arts are officially the most miserable after university with a satisfaction rate of -0.11. This is closely followed by media and communications grads who have a life satisfaction rate of -0.8 and materials and technology grads with -0.06.

General sciences, politics, performing arts and sociology grads were also found to have had a decrease in happiness after finishing their degrees.

So these are officially the uni degrees where graduates are the most miserable, in 2023:

20. Economics – 0.15

19. Business – 0.13

18. Chemistry – 0.11

17. Biosciences – 0.1

16. Computing – 0.09

15. Law 0.08

14. Combined and general studies – 0.08

13. Physics and astronomy – .008

12. Psychology – 0.08

11. Languages – 0.08

10. History and archaeology 0.06

9. Philosophy and religion – 0.05

8. English – 0.01

7. Sociology – -0.01

6. Politics – -0.01

5. Performing arts – -0.01

4. General sciences – -0.05

3. Materials and technology – -0.06

2. Media and communication – -0.08

1. Creative arts – -0.011

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