Arts: Higher Education

(asked on 20th July 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 16 July 2020 to Question 70489 on higher education: finance, what the cost to the public purse has been of support for media studies courses in higher education in each of the last three years.


Answered by
Michelle Donelan Portrait
Michelle Donelan
Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology
This question was answered on 28th July 2020

Reliable estimates of the historic cost to the public purse of degree subjects at this level of disaggregation are not available.

Recent research published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies looked at how financial returns to higher education, for both students and the taxpayer, differ by subject studied. They estimate that, on average, the taxpayer gains £110,000 per male graduate and £30,000 per female graduate through extra tax and National Insurance contributions less unpaid student loans, with economics and medicine seeing the greatest returns and creative arts seeing the lowest returns. The publication is available here:
https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/R167-The-impact-of-undergraduate-degrees-on-lifetime-earnings.pdf.

Reticulating Splines