Research by Feng and Graetz (2017) showed that there are variations of pay and status among those who graduated with a First and a 2:1. Graduates have been found to
experience an increased probability of working in a high-wage industry by 14 per cent if they achieved a First over those with a 2:1, and similarly these graduates are also on average receiving 3 per cent higher wages (Feng and Graetz, 2017). Further, the disparity in pay was found to be highly gendered, particularly in male-dominated employment spheres. For example, among graduates of mathematics, males who graduated with a First as opposed to a 2:1 had a higher probability of working in high- wage employment by 26 per cent, whereas women with Firsts only experienced a 6 per cent increased probability (Feng and Graetz, 2017).
However, similar comparisons cannot be drawn in this study as there were only two young women who graduated with a First (Lizzie, FWC, UoB, Engineering, and Megan, UWC, UoB, English). Nevertheless, what is evident is that, unlike most of the other women, both gained access to highly-selective post-graduation trajectories which may have been only within their scope due to their First class degrees. One did an internship and graduate scheme which led to a professional job as an engineer, the other accessed the Teach First program and went on to find work as a teacher. Due to having accessed these routes, they are more likely than those without these experiences to establish careers which are high status and high paid (Friedman and Laurison, 2019).
As is understood, qualitative data cannot tell the whole story (Reay, 2018) and so here I analyse the graduate-pay data of the young working-class women. This data can be found in appendix eight: graduate jobs and pay (p.265).
After rounding all the women’s self-reported wages to the nearest £100, only three of the fifteen working-class women graduated into work which paid within the new- graduate salary bracket (estimated between £20,000 (Ball, 2013) and £26,000
(Association of Graduate Recruiters, 2013; High fliers, 2013)). All three of these firmly- working-class women entered teaching post-PGCE. Ruby (UWE, English) and Anna (UoB, Politics and Economics) graduated to a £22,000 wage and Jackie (UoB, Sociology) to a £27,000 wage. Jackie’s higher wage was in line with the National Education Union’s (2015) recommended pay scale for those teaching in an inner-city London primary school.
163 On average, the fifteen working-class women graduated to a £13,400 wage.61 One-year
post-graduation this average wage increased to £17,400, two years post-graduation this increased to £20,500 and three-years post-graduation they earnt £21,600 on average.62
Thus, it took two years post-graduation before these women, on average, began earning wages which were at the lowest end of what is considered ‘entry-level graduate
salaries’.
While Walker and Zhu (2013, p.26) found the differences between pay of RG and non- RG graduates to be “statistically insignificant”, I found this not to be the case. However, it must be kept in mind that there was a small sample in this study (five graduates of UWE and ten of UoB). Though graduates of UWE and UoB graduated to a similar average wage of over £13,000, when further post-graduation pay data were compared, considerable difference was found:
Table fourteen: Comparison of UWE and UoB graduate wages
The average wages of those who graduated from UWE increased by 44 per cent (£5,800 per annum) over the three-year, post-graduation period. Throughout the same period, those who graduated from UoB saw, on average, an 80 per cent wage increase of £11,000 per annum. While on average neither group of graduates graduated to earning ‘new-graduate wages’ (between £20,000 (Ball, 2013) and £26,000 (Association of Graduate Recruiters, 2013; High fliers, 2013)), on average, graduates of UoB were receiving the upper end of this scale by three-years post-graduation. This was while graduates of UWE had, on average, not even began earning the lowest wages on this scale by this time.
61 Those who did not disclose their earnings but said they received minimum wage, I calculated them as earning £11,055 which at the time was the average income of a person on minimum wage working eight hours a day, five days a week (ONS, 2013a). However, some of the roles they were employed in were temporary and part-time, but I did not have the exact hours worked in order to calculate accurately. Thus, the averages outlined here may have been lower in reality.
62 Years two and three figures were based on the income of thirteen working-class women, Melissa (UWC, UoB, English) and Bianca (FWC, UoB, History) had left the study by these points.
Immediately PG One-year PG Two-years PG Three-years PG UWE (n=5) £13,100 £15,100 £14,800 £18,900 UoB (n=10) £13,500 £17,700 £23,700 £24,500
164 The significant increase in wages for the UoB graduates in this study could be due to half of them having studied at PG level, while only one UWE graduate did. However, the ways in which graduate employers value a Russell Group education over a non-RG education appear to be at play, as also found by other research (Friedman and Laurison, 2019; IFS, 2018; Wakeling and Savage, 2015; ONS, 2013b). Quantitative data
published in the same year the women in this study graduated from university showed that those who graduated from RG universities earned an average of £3.60 more per hour, were more likely to be in a ‘high skill role’ than those from non-RG universities (ONS, 2013b) and were more likely to enter ‘professional’ occupations (NS-SEC 1) (Wakeling and Savage, 2015). The implications of this are, as Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) also theorise, that universities (particularly those considered among the elite) are institutions which act as sites for the reproduction of class inequality and privilege and the labour market facilitated this. In particular, UoB accepts a student population which is disproportionately privileged (as outlined in chapter six) and, due to the cachet which a UoB graduate holds, they are more likely to be positioned as graduates to enter ‘professional’ and ‘elite’ forms of employment (Savage et al., 2015). Through facilitating this pipeline of to social advantage and reproduction, ‘elite’ Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are sites of misrecognition, de-valuation, exclusion and symbolic violence on the working-classes (which I have spoken about elsewhere63). This small quantitative data set demonstrated evidence of a cachet accredited to UoB graduates which holds an economic benefit. This had a profound effect on the wages of the firmly-working-class women who studied at UoB, compared to those who studied at UWE. While their wages were initially similar, the relative increase grew exponentially over time:
Table fifteen: Firmly-working-class women’s pay by university
63 Bentley, L. (2018a) ‘Class work’ in the Elite Institutions of Higher Education. Cambridge, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education. 21st February and, Bentley, L. (2018c) Fragmented and Convoluted:
Working-class experiences of Navigating Higher Education. At: Think Human, Festival of Humanities
and Social Sciences. Oxford Brookes University, Oxford. 23rd May.
Immediately PG One-year PG Two-years PG Three-years PG FWC UWE (n=5) £13,100 £15,100 £14,700 £18,900 UoB (n=6) £13,600 £20,000 £28,300 £29,300
165 Three years post-graduation, the firmly-working-class women who graduated from UoB were earning £10,400 per annum more on average than those who graduated from UWE. For these women, the cachet of having graduated from UoB was evident
throughout the interviews. Jade (Psychology, I7) found that having studied at UoB was perceived among her employers as synonymous with having the “brain power to learn” a new role in an area unfamiliar to her degree. Likewise, Jade found that:
the company use the fact ‘oh yeah we’ve got a Psychology graduate or
something from Bristol’ and they like to use this as their sales sort of thing, […] sometimes I wonder if I would have got offered the job if my degree was from not a Russell Group university.
(Psychology, I8)
Further analysis of their earnings showed that the firmly-working-class women consistently earned more than the upper-working-class women:
Immediately PG One-year PG Two-years PG Three-years PG FWC (n=11) £13,400 £17,700 £21,000 £23,200 UWC (n=4) £13,400 £13,900 £15,900 £18,90064
Table sixteen: Pay by class background
These findings contradict those published by Crawford and Vignoles (2014) who found that six months after graduation those whose parents occupied higher occupational classes, on average, were earning more than those from lower occupational class backgrounds. In this study, the upper-working-class women, whose parents had higher occupational class positions than the firmly-working-class women65, were among those with the lowest initial incomes and this continued to be the case over the following two years.
At this point in my analysis, it was necessary to draw on the qualitative data to further explore this phenomenon. This data showed that one of the women was receiving a stipend to do a PhD, and others were doing low-paid internships or low-paid work with
64 This figure is based only on two participants as Amelia and Melissa had dropped out by this point of the study.
65 Using data from appendix six (p.259), on average the upper-working-class women had father’s in National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC) classes 3 and mother’s in class 6, whereas both the parents of firmly-working-class women averaged to be in NS-SEC classes 5.
166 the aim to either defer career-making decisions or to refine their career aspirations further. As outlined in the literature review, opting for a part-time job (in SEC classes 6 and 7) on first entry to the labour market has been found to loosen the ‘stickiness’ of class and increase social fluidity for women over time (Goldthorpe, 2016).
While I understand that quantitative data explored in this study cannot be generalised to the wider population of young female working-class graduates, they do create a
snapshot of how the graduate labour market ‘values’ the different credentials (scholastic capital) and cultural capital typically by these women. These are findings which I hope to further explore with a larger, more representative sample in future research.