Medicine or social education? Career choices also depend on social class.

BarcelonaBeing of upper, middle, or lower social class influences the choice of university degree. This is one of the main conclusions of the report presented this Thursday by the Agency for the Quality of the Catalan University System (AQU) based on 21,000 surveys conducted among university graduates three years after completing their degree at a Catalan university.

According to the study Equity in job placement and social mobility for graduates from Catalan on-campus universities –one of the most prominent European reports in this field–, the choice of degree can be affected by the social background of students and their families, either due to the difficulties that a student's life situation may entail when it comes to completing studies that require a significant degree of dedication or due to the entrance grades for university degrees.

The report, prepared with data from 2023, shows how degrees in the field of medicine and biomedical sciences have the highest proportion of upper-class graduates (58.5%) and the lowest proportion of university graduates considered lower-class (11.8%). On the other hand, degrees in the field of social intervention are on the other side of the scale, which are the only ones that proportionally have more lower-class graduates (32.5%) than upper-class graduates (28.3%).

In this case, the AQU study considers upper class students to be those whose parents have secondary or higher education and who work non-manual jobs and hold management and responsibility positions, and lower class students to be those whose parents have primary or secondary education and who work manual jobs that require little qualification.

Thus, degrees in arts and design, industrial technologies, communication and documentation, or architecture and civil construction account for around 50% of upper-class graduates, while those from the lower class do not reach 20%. As for middle-class students, the degrees in which they represent a greater proportion are nursing and health (40%), languages and literature (41%), philosophy and history and social intervention (39.2%), and education (39%). Finally, beyond the levels of social intervention, the areas with the highest number of lower-class students in Catalonia are education (25.3%), languages and literature (24.5%), and psychology and therapy (23.6%).

Does the social elevator work?

Despite the impact of students' social backgrounds on their degree choices, the report also highlights how Catalan universities continue to be a determining factor in the upward mobility. "The data suggest that occupational advancement among university graduates is greater than that of the general population," the study states. In fact, the AQU highlights the fact that seven out of ten graduates from the Catalan university system hold higher technical positions—which require a university degree—while only a third of these graduates' parents had this occupational qualification.

However, although there isn't a significant class gap in the number of students who have jobs three years after leaving university, there is a clear difference in the salaries they receive. This difference is caused by the type of university degrees chosen by those from lower classes—careers with fewer job opportunities and more precarious conditions—and by the fact that upper-class students continue to have more opportunities to continue studying after their university degree. For all these reasons, the report shows that in 2023, the gross monthly salary gap between upper- and lower-class graduates was €206. This figure has been narrowing over the past eight years, from €260 to €206 today, but it is still double the salary gap recorded in 2011.