One of the great myths of British society is that if you go to a good university, get some work experience, and work hard at some point along the way, you will get a good job. This is no longer true.
The massive shortage of graduate jobs and surging youth unemployment is causing ever more consternation. Russell Group grads line up on news programmes to detail the hundreds of unsuccessful applications they have made, most of them ending without even the decency of a reply.
While this will cause huge tensions for the future deprived middle classes, this crisis may bring one positive, however painful. Britain’s higher education needs a revolution, and the failure of the job market should be what triggers it.
Education is — or can be — a good thing, but a British university education is an entirely different thing. Although we are lambasted with so-called virtues that universities give our young people, few of these are academic. The actual knowledge of arts students has never been lower, and even in “prestigious” universities few students do any of the readings. Seminars are quiet, with students scrolling job boards instead of listening to the poor PhD student teaching them. Academic passion has been completely divorced from the three years of a British university “education”.
This is down to several reasons. Firstly, the market doesn’t care that you know anything. A web of ever more bizarre games and aptitude tests governs entry to most graduate schemes. Having “cultural capital”, as it was once known, has little to no effect on your employment prospects; indeed, it probably worsens them.
Assessment at universities has gradually moved away from knowledge, spurred on by the pandemic and a well-meaning but far too powerful accessibility lobby, which have made coursework or “online exams” the norm for most arts modules.
In my case, this meant I would have had to read only two weeks of a thirteen-week course to complete it. This is reinforced by student preference, with modules that have exams being sidelined in an entirely predictable race to the bottom.
The modern university has become a right to spend three years working far less than at school while drinking and travelling, completely decoupled from any academic attainment. This is all subsidised by the promise of a grad job at the end. With that promise gone, the current system will not be sustainable. Even the drinking might feel a bit more glum than fun.
Sadly, much debate on this subject veers into bald anti-intellectualism. Yes, huge cuts in student numbers are needed, but there are still many academics doing work of immense value. From discovering ancient forts, to re-calibrating our understanding of the enlightenment. Any reordering has to promote high quality research over the current rush towards the most esoteric quota-fulfilling projects.
In any case, a huge streamlining of degrees is required. Every year there are about 140,000 psychology students enrolled in British universities, double the number of physics students. Even in an age of mental health awareness, this does sound like it could be one too many. The realisation by a lot of students that they will stack up huge debts with little to no graduate premium may cause a change of behaviour by itself, but a total solution is required.
Any new system should have some notion of national interest behind it. The best of our young people should be pushed to achieve the highest human capital possible. Arts degrees in particular need to be made far harder, ideally involving compulsory language study, and have a level of difficulty which re-establishes the link between a degree and employment. This should be in part subsidised by the state rather than the grotesque market system which currently hands the best British educations to the foreign upper classes at the expense of Britain’s own people.
Education is a good thing, but there’s not much of that at British universities
Sadly, I fear the Britain of 2026 is not capable of the mildest elitism required for the above, but that makes it doubly worthy of aspiration. As to those who don’t go to university, that needn’t be a bad thing. Britain’s primary problem is that it can’t produce enough well-paying jobs for those who want and need them. The current system only makes this worse by creating an equally unemployed but ever more indebted class who bought into a myth which no longer exists.
Education is a good thing, but there’s not much of that at British universities. The graduate job crisis should force us to consider how our young people spend their early adulthood; hundreds of thousands of pounds of debt with little learned should not be an option. Our society and its relationship with education needed some severe medicine, but this will be a very bitter pill to swallow.
