Don’t Want To Be Miserable After Graduation? These Are The Degrees To Avoid
New research shows which subjects produce the most miserable grads.
Uni is tough. While it might be all fun and games at first it gets to a point where the degree actually does take over and you have to stop prioritising going out and instead start a permanent residence in the library.
But it’s all worth it right? Because when you graduate you’ll land your dream job and you’ll be earning loads of money and you can go out every weekend without uni deadlines holding you back? Errr no actually, it turns out that’s not always the case.
Let’s put it this way, your degree choice definitely impacts what job you’ll get after graduation and in turn how much money you’ll earn. While when you applied for uni in sixth form you might’ve gone with a subject you loved, there’s nothing worse than the bitter reality of battling the job market during the cost of living crisis wishing you’d just sucked it up and done a STEM subject instead of art.
You only have to look on TikTok to see people crying over landing a 9-5 and the reality that this is actually the rest of your life and you’ll never have the freedom of uni again.
Well, all that aside, PwC recently did some research and analysed data from over 84,000 UK graduates in the last 10 years to determine life satisfaction after uni and which degree subjects truly do produce the unhappiest grads.
Which degrees produce the unhappiest graduates?
The following degrees were the lowest ranked on satisfaction post-university using the following scale: 0= Not satisfied, 10= totally satisfied
- Creative Arts -0.11
- Media and communications -0.08
- Materials and technology -0.06
- General sciences -0.05
- Politics -0.02
- Performing arts -0.02
- Sociology -0.01
- English 0.01
- Philosophy and Religion 0.05
- History and Archaeology 0.06
Are these results surprising? The sad reality is that a lot of grads who did creative or humanities degrees are left feeling unsatisfied after graduation, probably due to entering lower-paid sectors compared to graduates of Economics and Business degrees who on the flip side are the happiest graduates.
Of course, pay and job prospects shouldn’t matter, if you want to do a creative degree you do a creative degree. Let’s face it not all of us want to do STEM subjects and would be miserable doing so, so enjoy whatever degree you’re doing and uni while it lasts and worry about the rest later, as that’s a problem for later on.
