I'm a Cambridge student. Rachel Reeves has made job hunting impossible

Telegraph

15-05-2025

This time last year, in my final term at Cambridge, wondering anxiously what life after exams would hold, I started to panic.
My last outstanding job application had just come back with a rejection. With horror, I pictured myself returning to my childhood bedroom in failure, living off my parents' pity and charity until I finally converted my English degree into some sort of employment.
Now I know what you're thinking: what did you expect when you chose an English degree? But my looming unemployment was not for want of trying. I spent my summers doing any kind of internship or work experience I could find. I had ploughed almost every free moment during term into working at the student newspaper, which I had assumed would burnish my CV.
The fact is that for the students I know, whatever subject they study, whichever career they want to pursue, finding a job is always a Herculean task. A friend with a first-class computer science degree from Durham described his job hunting experience as only a bit better than medieval torture – and that was before Rachel Reeves raised employers' National Insurance contributions. This year, things are even worse.
In the 12 months to April, there were just 794 graduate schemes advertised, down from 1,224 a year earlier.
Now, the students applying for 50 jobs alongside studying for finals don't blame Rachel Reeves for their predicament. But the economics is straightforward: if you tax labour, employers will consume less of it. Today's revelation that the pool of grad schemes is shrinking should not be a surprise.
I swerved unemployment by spending another year at Cambridge, this time studying business instead of the humanities. And after another gruelling round of applications, assessment centres, and interviews, I finally received a job offer. On my new course, I was awed by how dedicated some of my fellow students were to playing the graduate labour market – and impressed at the results their efforts received.
Nonetheless, just because a barrier can be overcome doesn't mean we should ignore its existence. The people who suffer the most from the graduate labour market's brutality are the creative, wonderfully intelligent people I meet every day at Cambridge who just aren't sure what they want to do yet. These are people from whose talent we should all benefit as they find their way in the world. Instead, I see them cowed into putting off reality by taking on even more debt to study for a master's degree. Or, worse still, I see them pursuing careers they are manifestly unsuited to, because they can't justify chasing the job they really want while the economy is so hostile.
Finding your path after university is hard – even, it seems, with multiple qualifications under your belt. After investing so much in young people's education, you would expect the Government to try to help graduates make a success of their entry into the labour market. Instead, by raising National Insurance, the Chancellor appears to be doing the very opposite: turning their hopes into failure.