Why the Huge Increase in the Number of UK Graduates Is Bad for Everyone

This year we asked the question pretty much every school leaver, graduate and 20-something will have wondered: is it all still worth it? Forking out thousands, spending three+ years of your life getting pissed and reading books, moving to somewhere dire like Canterbury – what's the point? A third of graduates even regret going to uni altogether. The idea of university being the magic key to a bright future is being dismantled piece by piece, and this latest piece of research is finishing it off.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development – which represents people working in human resources – has concluded what anyone in their twenties already knows: that the all-party consensus to get more young people into higher education is no longer justified, given student debt and the careers many uni leavers end up in.

The CIPD has told the government to end the drive to get kids into university, since research shows graduates are "colonising" jobs in banking, education, the police and estate agency, which traditionally went to school leavers in the past.

A drive to get kids into university is usually justified by the fact graduates stand to earn more – but the CIPD said this is being called into question by the graduate's average debt of £44,000, and estimates that 45 percent of loans would never be paid off. The CIPD's previous research even showed that more than half of graduates take non-graduate jobs, and concluded that the current system was bad not just for uni leavers, but also school leavers who can't get a job because they're being snapped up by people with a degree.

If you want proof of that, their study of almost a third of the UK's workforce analysed the sorts of jobs graduates used to take and the ones they take now. The number of newly-employed teaching assistants with a degree has increased from 5.6 percent to 36.9 percent since 1979, while 41 percent of new jobs in property and housing management are graduates, compared to just 3.6 percent in 1979. The picture is the same in the police force – 43.9 percent of officers entering at the rank of sergeant or below have a uni qualification, up from 2 percent in 1979. That's a total turn around of the workforce structure.

Peter Cheese, CIPD chief executive, said: "This report shows clearly how the huge increase in the supply of graduates over the last 35 years has resulted in more and more occupations and professions being colonised by people with degrees, regardless of whether they actually need them to do the job." He added: "This research show[s] that for many graduates, the costs of university education outweigh its personal economic benefits. We need a much stronger focus on creating more high-quality alternative pathways into the workplace, such as higher level apprenticeships, so we really do achieve parity of esteem between the two routes."

As we move forward into a post-Brexit future, this is going to be bad for the economy, too. So what can be done to resolve this problem? Cheese suggests improving the quality of careers advice to young school leavers, and putting more emphasis on apprenticeships. Because the idea that going to uni will make you rich and successful just doesn't cut it any more.

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