The Economist writes avout the variation in earnings of British students who left school with good examination results:

Those with degrees in subjects like law, maths and economics can expect earnings around 25% higher than average. But returns on other subjects are sharply lower. Social studies brings a 10% premium. Education and languages may have returns close to zero. On average, arts degrees show a negative return. In other words, those graduates earned less than if they hadn't done their degree at all.

It may be that demand for graduates has slumped temporarily because the economy slowed a couple of years ago. In the past, financial returns to higher education overall have been very high in Britain; the government also likes to point to international studies that link extra years spent in education to higher economic growth.

But it seems likely that government policy, which has pushed up the proportion of youngsters going to university by nearly a quarter over the past ten years, and plans to increase it from its current 43% to 50% by 2010, has also had an effect. By all accounts, the quality of university education has fallen as the government has pushed more youngsters through the system without a commensurate increase in funding. And the price of most things tends to fall as quantity increases. It would be surprising if that did not apply to graduates.

(Emphasis mine.) In our university, all they care about is raising enrollments without a commensurate increase in funding. I wonder what that does to the quality of education for our students, and what that means for the quality of a degree.