Is your degree a wealth-builder or a lifetime tax? Calculate your 30-year debt lifecycle and AI-resilience risk in 60 seconds.
The Department for Education told prospective students to “choose carefully” rather than go to university by default — publishing its own analysis that medicine and economics can be worth up to £400,000 over a lifetime, while some subjects deliver little or negative financial return. That is the same question this site answers, subject by subject, using the department's own earnings data.
Figures current as of August 2026. Degree Index takes no view on whether you should go — it shows you the numbers for your subject and lets you decide.
For most of the last century, "go to university" was the assumed next step, not a decision anyone actually ran the numbers on. That assumption is getting expensive to hold onto blindly, for two reasons happening at once.
The entry-level roles many degrees are built to lead into are being reshaped by AI faster than most courses are updating to account for it.
Universities are struggling to tell AI-written coursework from a student's own work — which means the piece of paper is starting to certify less than it used to.
Whatever happens to the job market or the credential, the loan still accrues interest from day one, on the terms set out below.
"A study that analysed 25 student papers across eight university courses found that faculty correctly identified AI-generated submissions only 53.75 per cent of the time."— LSE Impact Blog ↗