Forget the struggles of completing an Oxbridge degree — a group of economists have calculated that appearing as a contestant on TV show Love Island for eight weeks is likely to net you more money over the course of your life than three years at Oxford or Cambridge university.
Analysis by Frontier Economics, an economic consultancy, estimated that someone who appears on the show could expect to earn £1.1m from subsequent sponsorship and appearance fees, compared with a lifetime average return of £815,000 from completing an undergraduate degree at Oxbridge.
With the hit ITV2 show, featuring sun, sangria and sex on the east coast of Mallorca, Spain, reaching its climax on Monday, five Frontier economists spent two weeks demonstrating that celebrity pays more than scholarship.
“If you’ve got an offer from Oxbridge and Love Island, you’re better off going on Love Island,” said Kristine Dislere, who completed her masters degree in economics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
British school leavers have instinctively come to a similar conclusion with 85,000 applications to appear on the 2018 series, compared with only 37,000 applications for undergraduate degree courses at Oxford and Cambridge universities combined.
But Ms Dislere cautioned that despite the financial gains from up to eight weeks of event television, any teenager should still favour the academic route because the odds of getting a place are so much better. “One major thing we haven’t included are the odds of getting in and the odds are stacked against you,” she said.
The five Frontier economists, none of whom attended Oxbridge, calculated the expected returns of appearing on Love Island by examining the behaviour of contestants in past series and estimating the appearance money they earned from sudden stardom and the likely fees they could earn from sponsored posts on their Instagram pages.
“These two sources of income are almost guaranteed for anyone returning from the Love Island sunshine,” the report said, noting that the likely earnings were very closely related to the length of time any contestant stayed in the villa.
One former contestant, Oliver, from the second series in 2016 only lasted a day on the show and now has 6,000 followers, a tiny fraction of the 620,000 average number of followers for former contestants.
Those that stayed on the programme for half its eight weeks could expect to earn £1.1m after the show, but those that were there from start to finish could expect to earn £2.3m.
In past years, there has been only an extra £100,000 premium for winning the show, the report said, which will be slightly disappointing news for Dani Dyer and Jack Fincham, who are odds-on favourites to win this year’s competition.
Frontier Economics, a normally publicity-shy consultancy which offers strategic advice for companies, used the skills they deploy to help firms game regulations to examine how contestants could maximise their earnings in the Love Island competition.
From past experience of public votes, contestants were better off being loyal rather than seeking to break up other couples on the show, the report said, but the best strategy was always to couple up with another contestant who themselves had been in the villa a long time and had a record of proving popular in public votes.
Source: Financial Times