A university degree is now more like a 'visa' than a guaranteed route to professional success
Earlier this week, I published at my newly-revamped personal blog a post entitled Your mental models are out of date. The main thrust of what I was saying was that young people are getting advice from older people whose understanding of the world does not mesh with the way things really are in the mid-2020s.
This article in The Guardian is helpful for understanding the other side of the argument from a policy perspective. My opinion is that as many young people who want to go to university should be able to go, and that it’s the duty of us as a society to enable that to happen as efficiently as possible. Yes, that means that the value of a ‘degree’ as a chunky proxy credential decreases, but that’s why we should have more tailored, up-to-date, granular credentials in any case.
Prof Shitij Kapur, the head of King’s College London, said the days when universities could promise that their graduates were certain to get good jobs are over, in an era where nearly half the population enters higher education.
Kapur said a university degree is now more like a “visa” than a guaranteed route to professional success, a reflection of the shrinking graduate pay premium and the increased competition from AI and other graduates from around the world.
“The competition for graduate jobs is not just all because of AI filling out forms or AI taking away jobs. It’s also because of the stalling of our economy and causing a relative surplus of graduates. So the simple promise of a good job if you get a university degree, has now become conditional on which university you went to, which course you took,” Kapur said.
“The old equation of the university as a passport to social mobility, meant that if you got a degree you were almost certain to get a job as a socially mobile citizen. Now it has become a visa for social mobility – it gives you the chance to visit the arena that has graduate jobs and the related social mobility, but whether you can make it there is not a guarantee.”
[…]
Figures from the Department for Education show that England’s graduates still enjoy higher rates of employment and pay than non-graduates, although the real earnings of younger graduates have been stagnant for the past decade. Kapur points out that the national economy’s slow growth coincided with England’s introduction of £9,000 tuition fees and student loans in 2012, making it “the worst possible time” to transition to individual student loans.
In 2022, Kapur wrote a gloomy discussion of UK higher education that described a “triangle of sadness” between students burdened with debt and pessimistic prospects, a government that used inflation to cut tuition fees, and overstretched university staff trapped in between.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Christian Lendl