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18th Feb 2019

Teachers have highest starting salary in Ireland, arts graduates have the lowest

Jade Hayden

Hands up if you did an arts degree!

All of us. We all did.

And yeah, the starting wage might be considerably lower than our healthcare, education, or technology based counterparts, but money can’t buy self fulfillments, lads.

That’s what we’ve been telling ourselves, anyway.

A new report published by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) showed that arts and humanities graduates have the lowest starting wage in Ireland.

It also revealed that the highest starting wage was in teaching, with the average education graduate starting off on €38,701 nine months after getting their qualification.

After this came ICT graduates starting off on €36,135 and engineering graduates on €36,817.

Following this were people working in health, business administration, natural sciences, social sciences, and finally at the very bottom of the list, were arts and humanities graduates coming in at a solid €24,728 starting salary.

The report showed that on average, most graduates managed to find work within nine months of graduating, with 90 percent of them finding employment in Ireland.

The rest were either in further education, traveling, or seeking work.

The mean salary for all graduates working full time was found to be €33,574, with the majority of people starting on a wage between €20,000 and €35,000 in their respective field.

You can access the full report here.