University is much more worthwhile if you're a woman – but that's not actually a good thing

Since tuition fees were hiked up to a stinging £9,000 a year, much work has been put into analysing the value of a British degree. Given that the average undergraduate leaves their three-year programme in possession of a 2:1 degree and a debt of approximately £50,000, these studies attempt to answer the question of whether a degree is still worth the investment of both time and, more significantly, cash that young students put in. Will they, in short, pay off in better job prospects and higher lifetime earnings?

The latest number-crunching, carried out by the Department for Education and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, presents no straightforward answer. Inevitably, it reveals that some elite universities confer a salary premium while others may in fact have the opposite effect. More interestingly, this effect depends on whether you are a man or a woman.

Although there are a handful of universities that are leaving their male graduates in a worse position in terms of earning prospects at age 29, the broader picture demonstrates that university is a much wiser investment for young women than men.

Women with a degree, it is revealed, earn 28 per cent more than non-graduate women. Men with degrees can only expect an 8 per cent boost in their income. And a third of male graduates go to universities that confer only a “negligible” earnings example.

This raises questions about use, value and quality of some higher education institutions. The marketisation of higher education may be reaching its zenith; universities will have to change fast and considerably if they are to respond to the rightful demands of future generations for a qualification that is demonstrably, unequivocally worth their while.

However, the most interesting conclusion we can draw here is not actually one about degrees but what happens to those without one. If universities are so much better for women, that’s because women’s prospects overall are relatively so much worse.

We know that women who have a degree earn an average of £6,700 more than women without a scroll in hand. The penalty is much less for men. Why is this? Because non-graduate women are much more likely to be in low-paid work; and because, out of those working in sectors notorious for low pay, women are likely to earn significantly less than men. Men don’t need a degree to lift themselves out of poverty, but a woman without one will statistically do much worse.

This isn’t a story about graduates and graduate premiums. It’s a story about how little value our economy places on working class women in blue-collar jobs.

In the UK, 62 per cent of all low-paid employees are women. Women make up the majority of staff on zero-hours contracts. That’s despite the fact that the working-age employment rate for men and women is now almost equal (71 per cent for women, and 80 per cent for men).

On average, the gender pay gap is 9 per cent, but it is well documented that this gap increases in those professions strongly skewed in favour or one or another sex. These professions are particularly found in blue-collar employment: supermarket tills, social care work, warehouses and factory work. In the UK, those large organisations which have reported the largest gender gaps in their pay under new transparency legislation add some colour to that picture. Cabin crew, school canteen workers, retail staff and childcare supervisors were among the jobs offered by these worst-offending employers.

Analysis of workforce data in the US reveals that in some blue-collar jobs – machinery operation, hazardous waste disposal, electrical repair and cinema projectionists, for example – women are only earning around half the take-home pay of their male counterparts.

Add to this the class pay gap, which in the UK is guesstimated at £6,800 a year, and it paints a grim picture of working life for women in blue-collar roles, often trapped in low pay and with little chance of promotion or earnings improvement.

Very often these jobs are in service or care. They are linked to traditional “women’s work”: the hard labour that goes unpaid and unrecognised in the home, once again underrated and under-rewarded even when performed under contract of employment in the formal economy.

Of course, the picture is complicated by the fact that the pay gap actually widens in white-collar work. When you get up to the level of chief executive, the gap becomes a chasm – in part because so few women achieve that level of seniority in the workplace.

In short, university is good for women, but not because women are gaining more intellectually from the process of studying. They gain more because they always have so much to lose.