by Our News Desk

RICHER university students are earning thousands more than their poorer colleagues even if they attend the same universities, research published yesterday shows.

A gender gap was also discovered, with men more likely to take home higher salaries than women who went to the same institution.

Tax data and student loan records for 260,000 students in England were analysed up to a decade after graduation by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the Institute of Education and the universities of Cambridge and Harvard.

“This work shows that the advantages of coming from a high-income family persist for graduates right into the labour market at age 30,” said IFS research economist and study author Jack Britton.

“While this finding doesn’t necessarily implicate either universities or firms, it is of crucial importance for policymakers trying to tackle social immobility.”

Their study covered graduates who started their degree between 1998 and 2011 and focused mainly on the 2012-13 tax year.

The findings were that those from the richest 20 per cent of homes earned more in the workplace than the other 80 per cent of students, with an average earnings gap 10 years after graduation of £8,000 a year for men and £5,300 a year for women.

Once subjects studied and types of university were taken into account, an average student from a high-income family took home about 10 per cent more than those from other backgrounds.

The study suggested that the highest earning men from richer homes had a salary around 20 per cent higher than the highest earners from poorer backgrounds.

Among women the same figure was 14 per cent.

Creative arts graduates had the lowest salaries, earning no more on average than youngsters who did not go to university at all.

There were also 23 institutions where typical male graduate earnings were less than the typical salaries for non-graduates 10 years on and nine such institutions for women.

Umbrella group Universities UK president Dame Julia Goodfellow said it has established a social mobility advisory group earlier this year to improve access for under-represented groups in education.

“Graduate earnings cannot, however, be used as the sole measure of success,” she added.