When a university degree won't get you a decent job or home

The Guardian

15-05-2025

The university degree was never a guaranteed ticket to a good career. I graduated from Cambridge about the same time as Gaby Hinsliff (We told young people that degrees were their ticket to a better life. It's become a great betrayal, 13 May). Without middle-class connections, or 'professional' work experience, I returned home after graduation to a neighbourhood counted among the 1% most deprived in England, in a post-industrial northern city with a crumbling social infrastructure. I had £30 to my name and took a job worse than the one I'd had while at school in order to live.
To get to London, where there was a greater range of jobs, I did non-graduate work for a few years, sofa-surfing to begin with. Like today's graduates, I had to do further study to get a decent job, and I was just shy of 40 when I managed to get a career job. I guess it is a better life in the end, as the alternative may well have been a cycle of bad jobs and unemployment.
Of course, this circuitous route to decent work and conditions means that I couldn't afford to live in London (I left), and won't ever earn enough for a middle-class home and a good pension.
As always, jobs, housing, pensions and other social issues become a political problem when it is deep enough to affect privileged white middle-class people in addition to those at the bottom of the pecking order who were already affected.Name and address supplied
Gaby Hinsliff writes of the increasingly disappointing prospects for new graduates. Thanks to the Blair-era policy of 'everyone must go to university', we have a massive oversupply of young graduates in the UK. We also have a massive shortage of more practical skills – Angela Rayner's ambitious housebuilding programme was scuppered before it even got off the ground because we do not have nearly enough tradespeople to build 1.5m homes.
Yet the government has just announced its intention to allow only those with a degree to immigrate to Britain as skilled workers. Astoundingly, they are going to import more graduates to compete with young British graduates for jobs, while banning the people we need most – those who do the jobs that young British people can't or won't do. I'm trying to think of a way this policy could be more stupid, but I'm not succeeding.Anne-Louise CrockerShoreham, Kent
Gaby Hinsliff notes that many graduates of the class of 2024-25 may struggle to find appropriate employment. That is true, although those who do get jobs will get better salaries over time, albeit with student loans to pay off. Hinsliff also raises the issue of whether studying for a degree is worthwhile. It is an argument put forward by the culture-war right – namely, that graduates who can't get jobs become highly educated troublemakers.
Indeed, while my first degree, nearly 50 years ago, did lead me into a professional job, it also taught me how to write a leaflet, organise a protest and speak at mass meetings. None of this was of course on the official curriculum. A reminder, and something Hinsliff misses, that there is such a thing as a liberal education, something beyond monetary value.Keith FlettTottenham, London
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