How does £67,000 a year sound?
How much is your law degree actually worth? Well, there’s a jobs website that claims to have the answer.
Adzuna’s Value My Degree calculator allows curious grads to check the value of qualifications from a given uni, using information on the CVs uploaded to its website.
An undergrad law degree from Oxford is calculated at £36,500, with Cambridge roughly the same. This figure represents the expected salary five years after graduation.
Taking a quick trip around the UK, Edinburgh University law grads are supposedly due £32,700, Cardiff grads £29,000 and Queen’s Belfast grads £27,800.
The calculator relies on a lot of statistical jiggery-pokery. It’s built on an existing Adzuna tool called ValueMyCV, which takes information on someone’s CV such as education, experience and skills and calculates what they should expect to be earning.
The company ran almost 700,000 CVs through this tool to get salary estimates for each one, and then broke those estimates down again by course and university. It’s a bit artificial: some of the results are “hypothetical combinations of universities and course names which don’t currently exist”.
So how does it stack up against the government’s official statistics, which combines data from the Department for Education and the taxman to produce an estimate as close to reality as we’re likely to get?
According to this source, completing an undergraduate law degree at Oxford will actually see you earning £67,000 after five years. Cambridge grads scrap by on a miserly £58,500 — still much higher than the Value My Degree tool says.
The Cardiff law class of 2011 was earning £27,700 on average by 2016, while Edinburgh grads were scoring £35,000. The average for law grads across Great Britain — Northern Ireland isn’t covered — was a respectable £25,900.
