Don’t blame universities for the graduate crisis
Blaming universities for the graduate crisis is convenient, but it isn’t true, writes Eliza Filby
It seems that every week brings a new statistic confirming what many now believe: that university no longer pays, graduate unemployment is the new crisis and that higher education has failed a generation. This week we read research from the Centre for Social Justice that found that 700,000 graduates are now claiming some form of welfare – a 46 per cent increase since 2019.
For critics of higher education, this is proof that too many young people are being funnelled into degrees that don’t translate into jobs, leave them in debt and expose them to economic insecurity. The conclusion feels neat, even satisfying – even to someone like me, who spent a near decade teaching in higher education and knows its flaws intimately.
This convenient framing – emotive and reductive – taps into some of Britain’s current anxieties: about the collapse of meritocracy, generational disadvantage and the alleged indulgence and irrelevance of “ivory tower” institutions. In reality, what we are witnessing is not a sudden failure of universities, but the end of a long-standing consensus on education and training.
That consensus did not begin with Tony Blair’s famous pledge in 1999 that 50 per cent of young people should attend university. It actually started earlier, with the John Major government’s decision in the early 1990s to turn polytechnics into universities, embedding the sensible idea that higher education should be mass rather than elite, that in a post-industrial knowledge economy, we needed knowledge workers.
By 2017, the UK finally crossed the 50 per cent participation threshold, actually well behind countries such as Canada which pushed closer to 70 per cent. The logic was simple and widely accepted: more education would mean higher productivity, better wages, even better citizens. Government papers throughout the 2010s were awash with optimistic claims and evidence that a highly educated society was a better, more informed, less crime-ridden society whose participants voted and volunteered more. Prime justification when fees were going up. I’m still waiting for that utopia.
What about the other 50 per cent?
Nonetheless for a long time, that logic broadly held. What we never properly confronted was what was happening to the other 50 per cent who didn’t go. Governments, businesses and schools did remarkably little to build credible, well-funded alternatives, and when apprenticeships were finally reformed, the results were more complex than the headlines suggest.
The apprenticeship levy, introduced in 2017, did not increase overall learning; it redistributed it. Employer investment in training per worker has fallen sharply over the past two decades in the UK, is paltry compared to our European neighbours, and a smaller share of the workforce now receives any structured training at all. What the levy incentivised was not mass upskilling, but targeted investment in people that many firms were already committed to. Today, more than half of all apprenticeship starts are taken up by those aged 25 and over – often existing employees being upskilled rather than young entrants.
Degree apprenticeships illustrate the paradox perfectly. They now account for around 15-17 per cent of all apprenticeship starts and deliver impressive outcomes: around 85 per cent of these graduates are in full-time work 15 months on and only 0.1 per cent are unemployed. But these programmes are often harder to access than Oxbridge and increasingly skewed towards more advantaged candidates such as kids with parents with the right networks. Meanwhile, lower-level and youth apprenticeships have steadily declined, starts for under-19s have almost halved since the mid-2010s, and small and medium-sized employers have pulled back as funding tightened and bureaucracy increased.
The result is a deeply uneven system. We created a university funding model where almost every institution charges the same fee but delivers very different returns. We built a student finance system that effectively priced out mature students and continues to act as a drag on graduates long after they’ve left the exam hall. We have a payback system that uniquely disadvantages women who have children and lasts the majority of your working life. We designed an apprenticeship system that rewards firms for training those already inside the tent, while narrowing entry points for younger and less advantaged workers. All of this sits atop a school exam system that is a leading cause of stress among teenagers (more than social media), favours girls over boys, neurotypical over neurodiverse, and channels young people into a single, high-stakes pathway with little room for failure.
Post-Covid, and in the age of AI, this is a disaster waiting to be addressed. What we cannot do is simply declare that “a degree doesn’t pay; go be a plumber”. The consensus is changing but to make it just about universities would be to let businesses, schools and government off the hook. The real task now is to redesign the pathways into adulthood for a post-Covid, AI-shaped economy – one that no longer assumes linear careers, academic conformity, perfect choices at 18 or a single route to security.
Dr Eliza Filby is a historian of generations and author of the Sunday Times bestseller Inheritocracy