Exploring earnings of creative graduates: “rip-off” degrees or under-rewarded careers?

In this blog, ADR UK Research Fellow Dr Orian Brook describes how she is exploring the earnings of creative graduates, and graduate employment in creative industries.  Her project looks at earnings in the context of her previous research on social mobility, precarity and multiple jobholding in creative careers, as well as classed, gendered and racialised inequalities in getting into – and getting on in – creative work. Orian is a Chancellor’s Fellow in Social Policy at the University of Edinburgh.

My motivation

Having worked in the creative industries after graduating in music, I knew that there was a complex dynamic of social reproduction and networking, policy intervention and creative invention involved in entering creative education and creative work. Eventually I became a researcher and co-author of The Panic Report and the book Culture is bad for you. These works explore how creative workers are, on one hand, extremely progressive, and on the other, in occupations deeply marked by social inequalities in both access and progression to senior roles.

In particular we explored factors like precarious contracts, reliance on social networks, and the expectation of working for free. We also interrogated how the experience of these working conditions was related to peoples’ social class background. Moreover, people in creative jobs are twice as likely as other workers to have two jobs, either both in creative fields or one in another sector such as teaching.

This research was based on a mixture of our own survey and interviews with creative workers, and government surveys such as the Labour Force Survey and the ONS Longitudinal Study. Creative workers are often difficult to analyse because they are relatively rare, so the number that appear in surveys is small.

Alongside co-authors, I had also analysed the characteristics of creative students, and their initial employment in particular, using the Higher Education Statistics Authority’s Graduate Outcomes Survey. However, we didn’t study what graduates earn, due to a lack of robust data.

Linked administrative data

“Crackdown on rip-off University degrees” was the title of a press release from the Department for Education in July 2023. This followed a comment by the then Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson, about students pivoting towards STEM degrees and away from “dead end courses that leave young people with nothing but debt”.  A series of reports from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) on the earnings of graduates had shown that the earnings of creative graduates were on average lower than other subjects, having accounted for student characteristics. These reports were based on the Longitudinal Educational Outcomes (LEO) dataset, a linked, de-identified administrative dataset allowing analysis of the links between education and earnings.

The implication of some commentary based on the IFS reports was that creative degrees were either poor quality, or didn’t offer skills that were useful and sought-after in employment. I wondered to what extent the lower earnings of these graduates are related to the high levels of creative graduates going into education? Or are they related to low pay and precarious work in the creative industries?  

I am also very interested to see how these earnings are distributed between different social groups. Are those who graduate from more prestigious universities able to use their social networks to earn well from creative work? Do people from working class backgrounds struggle to flourish without the cultural capital of their relatively advantaged peers?

I am excited about the potential that the LEO data offers to analyse in detail employment in creative industries, and of creative graduates. The dataset is larger, more complete and more robust than any earnings data previously available. What can the data show us about multiple job-holding and precarity, that is difficult to evidence through other datasets?

This research has the potential to inform education policy, to aid understanding of which students have lower earnings following a creative degree and what interventions might mitigate this. It also speaks to cultural policy, and has the potential to inform debates around the impact of precarious work on the workforce.

Orian is an ADR UK Research Fellow using the Longitudinal Education Outcomes - England dataset. Find out more about the fellowship project.