The gap in the employment rate between graduates and those who did not attend university has never been greater, new figures suggest.

However, the Department for Education (DfE) has announced that the latest release of graduate labour market data will be the last amid ongoing questions over whether it accurately represents graduate outcomes.

 show that 87.6 per cent of 16- to 64-year-old graduates were employed in 2024, which was unchanged from the year before and slightly below the peak year of 2018.

But the employment rate for non-graduates of working age fell to its lowest level since 2013 (68 per cent) which meant that the gap between the two was a record 19.6 percentage points.

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In contrast, the postgraduate employment rate rose to a record 90 per cent. This means that the gap between those with a master’s degree and those with an undergraduate degree has also never been greater – and is double what it was in 2017.

Despite the graduate employment rate not improving, the DfE figures show that 67.9 per cent of working-age graduates were in highly skilled jobs – the highest rate since 2008.

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In comparison, 79 per cent of postgraduates and 23.7 per cent of non-graduates were in managerial roles, professional occupations or associate professional jobs.

For those aged 21 to 30 specifically, the employment rates for postgraduates, graduates and non-graduates all fell last year.

The median salaries in 2024 were deemed to be £42,000 for graduates and £47,000 for postgraduates, which both increased by £2,000 on the year before. The average wage for non-graduates rose by £1,000 to £30,500.

This would suggest that the so-called “graduate premium” has never been higher. But the Office for Statistics Regulation watchdog recently ruled that the framing of this overall average has limitations and could be misleading.

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The DfE cautioned that because of ongoing limitations on the quality and availability of data in the Labour Force Survey it was planning to cease publication of the release after it decided that “more robust” figures on graduate earnings were available elsewhere.

Paul Wiltshire, a semi-retired accountant and the father of four UK university graduates and current students, has warned that the “inadequate” figures overestimate the monetary value of a degree by failing to account for prior academic attainment.

“Hundreds of thousands of our young adults are being sucked into the system every year where they end up with a life-changing level of debt for no or very little career pay benefits,” he said in a statement.

“And even those who do end up with a decent job, that job very often didn’t genuinely need them to have studied for a degree.”

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patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com