Waiters and garbage collectors with 110 cum laude: they are engineers, lawyers, art historians. How much does it pay to get a degree?

What is a college degree worth in the job market? It is from this question that the new University Report 2020 compiled by Job Pricing Observatory in collaboration with Spring Professional starts: it is a survey published annually with the aim of verifying which paths graduates take once they finish their studies and the “value” of education in the Italian labor market.

Meanwhile, it must be premised that Italy is a country with few graduates, despite the vulgate leading us to think otherwise: in our country, only 19.3 percent of the population has an academic degree, compared to 36.9 percent in OECD countries (the data are taken from the OECD’s Education at glance study and refer to 2019). Merciless numbers even if we look only at young people aged 25-34: 27.7 percent of them have a college degree, compared with 44.5 percent in OECD countries (to give an idea: in first place is South Korea with 69.6 percent, then comes Canada with 61.8 percent, while among our neighbors we have Switzerland at 51.2 percent, France at 46.9 percent, Greece at 42.8 percent, Slovenia at 40.7 percent, Austria at 40.5 percent, Germany at 32.3 percent, Hungary at 30.6 percent: worse than us only Mexico at 23.4 percent). As a result, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, young Italians would need incentives to enroll in college and graduate, partly because college graduates in our country earn 39 percent more than those who only graduated from high school.

But there’s more: Italy spends less than other countries on education (3.6 percent of GDP versus the OECD average of 5 percent) and has a far higher dropout rate than the OECD average (14.5 percent versus 10.6 percent). And we are the worst off when we look at the number of NEETs, or young people between 20 and 34 who are neither studying nor working: 28.9 percent against the European average of 16.5 percent. Having a college degree, however, pays off, according to ISTAT: among college graduates, the unemployment rate is 4.6 percent, compared to 8.9 percent among high school graduates, 12.7 percent among those with a middle school diploma and 17.5 percent among those with only an elementary school diploma. The situation, however, is more serious for 25-34 year olds, where the unemployment rate is 11.9 percent for college graduates, 13.6 percent for high school graduates, 20.9 percent for those with only an eighth grade degree, and 27 percent for those with an elementary school diploma.

However, having a college degree is not always a guarantee of finding the job one studied for. In Italy, 42.1 percent of young people are in jobs for which a lower level of education than they have might be sufficient. “In Italy,” reads the University Report, “the phenomenon of over-education is combined with a low percentage of graduates, a high level of youth unemployment, but also with evidence of the ’premium’ that tertiary education, especially in scientific disciplines, represents in terms of employment and also, as we will see later, in terms of career development and pay.” Thus, there are two problems that stem from this situation: aneducational offer at the university level that is not adequately aligned with the demand for skills from businesses, and a weak ability to guide young people toward education and the professions for which there is most demand.

According to the latest Almalaurea report (2019), which every year compiles lists of the disciplinary groups that have the greatest or least difficulty in finding a job, those studying engineering, those graduating in science subjects, or those obtaining a degree in medicine or the chemical-pharmaceutical field find employment more easily, while the last three places in the ranking are occupied by degrees in psychology (according to Almalaurea the worst group for finding a job), those in law and those in the humanities-literary fields. Also according to this report, 15 percent of Italian graduates at any level are out of work one year after graduation.

“The over-education, according to these data,” reads University Report, “can be explained in good part as the effect of the gap between the type of preparation of graduates and the actual market demand, which determines first a difficulty to enter the world of work and then a downward revision of expectations in order to avoid unemployment.” We not infrequently read stories (the last one, relaunched the day before yesterday by Repubblica on social media, was about an engineer who graduated with a 110 cum laude degree who chose to be a garbage collector in order to have a decent job) of young people who, having graduated with honors in subjects such as cultural heritage, literature, psychology, communication sciences, but also chemistry, mathematics, engineering or medicine, who are forced to accept jobs as waiters in fast food restaurants or as call center operators in order not to remain unemployed.

The fact remains, however, that those with a bachelor’s degree earn more on average than non-graduates (39,787 euros on average per year compared to 27,662 for graduates: a figure that rises to 41,833 for master’s graduates and 47,298 for those with a second-level master’s degree). It is thus clear that “the completion of the university course of study, at least with the attainment of a first-level master’s degree or master’s degree, is a decisive factor in terms of salary.” In short, studying pays off, despite everything: salary grows as the degree increases, and a graduate has on average a 40% higher salary than a non-graduate. And this is despite the fact that entry salaries today are much lower than they were ten years ago, although from 2013 to today the trend is positive (in 2007 the first salary of a master’s degree graduate was an average of 1,318 euros per month, today it is 1,224: after five years the salary increases by an average of about 150 euros).

Still, the report stresses that “education is a decisive factor in the likelihood of access to the most important positions and to climb the organizational hierarchy”: in fact, the data show that the percentage of executives and managers is much higher among graduates, and that a graduate executive or manager earns more (about five thousand euros per year on average) than a non-graduate executive or manager.

What, finally, are the highest-paying degrees and universities? The ranking is led by management engineers (average annual salary of 32,665 euros in 2019 for graduates between 25 and 34 years old), then chemical engineers (32,063), statistical science graduates (31,962), mechanical, naval, aeronautical and aerospace engineers (31,887), economics graduates (31,574), and computer engineers (30,618). The worst paid are graduates in foreign languages and literatures (26,086), followed by earth scientists (26,734), graduates in history or philosophy (27,261), those with degrees in ancient sciences or philological-literary or art-historical subjects (27,266), pedagogues and psychologists (27,406). Art historians have the lowest expectation of salary growth: between the ages of 25-34 and 45-54, the salary for graduates in the sciences of antiquity or philological-literary or art-historical subjects grows by only 26 percent. Better goes for doctors (33 percent), history and philosophy graduates (34 percent), mathematicians and computer scientists (40 percent), and foreign language and literature graduates (42 percent). The largest increases are for chemical engineers (87 percent), management engineers (86 percent), mechanical, naval, aeronautical and aerospace engineers (83 percent), chemists (75 percent), and business graduates (64 percent).

They earn more on average than graduates from a private university (44,195 euros, compared to 42,903 at polytechnics and 39,311 at state universities). There is also an important geographic gap: 41,275 euros is the average annual salary of those who graduate in the north, compared with 40,122 in the center and 37,798 in the south and islands. There is also great disparity in job locations: those who graduate in the north, work in the north 94 percent of the time, in the center 5 percent and in the islands 1 percent. Those who graduate from the center stay there in 71 percent of cases, while 26 percent move north and only 3 percent end up in the south. The situation for southern graduates is different: 44% migrate to the north, 21% to the center and 35% remain in the South.

The best universities by average earnings are Bocconi in Milan (35,081 is the average annual salary of graduates between 25 and 34 years old), LUISS (32,980), Milan Polytechnic (32,796), Cattolica (32,118), Turin Polytechnic (31,595), and the University of Brescia (31,581). Also above 31,000 are Roma Tor Vergata (31,307), Padua (31,208), Parma (31,112), Siena (31,108) and Pisa (31,103). Instead, they earn less than all graduates in Perugia (29,002), followed by Cagliari (29,233) and Ferrara (29,460). Less than 30,000 also for Messina (29,514), Naples Parthenope (29,538), Verona (29,709) and Bari (29,732).

Waiters and garbage collectors with 110 cum laude: they are engineers, lawyers, art historians. How much does it pay to get a degree?

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