If you're a girl, that is. Your degree will get 31% more pay with your degree than without it! For us guys, the picture is a little less dramatic - with economics your pay will be 19.6% higher than it would otherwise have been. If you do an arts degree and you are male, your pay will be a rather more trifling 5% higher. The research underlying this is commented on here.
Why is this all important? Well, if fees double as is likely to be the case, it makes a non-economics social science degree (or some other humanities degree) seem like a very poor investment - a very low rate of return for a high outlay. As the article says, a humanities degree becomes something of a consumption good, as opposed to an investment.
An investment good, as you'll be learning about this year, is something that yields future returns. A consumption good only yields current returns (when you consume that Mars Bar). If your pay is unlikely to go up much and your fees are very high, then it can't be that you're buying the good (a humanities degree) for investment purposes. It must be for consumption - the joy of learning for example.
Your economics degree on the other hand, regardless of whether you're a boy or a girl, will pay off in the future via higher earnings and hence is worth the investment.
This blog accompanies the econ101ab Principles of Economics course given at the University of Birmingham. The lecturers for both parts of the course (101a, microeconomics and 101b, macroeconomics) will occasionally post here on matters related to lecture material. We hope to show the relevance of the concepts we are teaching at each stage of the course for helping understand how the world works...
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