University Is Really Just Another Archdiocese For Labour’s Cult Of Debt

And you thought it was just the banks who’d get a bail-out. No, students and small businesses too, apparently. However, for those university students about to enter (or try to enter) the workforce, frantically pumping money the government hasn’t got into the cracks in the economy is beginning to look like sand-bagging in the face of a tidal wave.

Even Oxford University’s Head of Careers, Jonathan Black, admitted he was concerned when I spoke to him yesterday about the job slump facing freshly matured graduates this autumn.

“In October we could see that students going to finance fairs were down 10% … there’s clearly going to be a change.”

“4% of Oxford graduates went straight into investment banking in 2007,” he says, “and we’d expect that to fall this year, but can’t predict by how much just yet.”

Black’s also expecting the number of unemployed graduates to rise this year, but seemed confident that the Russell Group Universities would ride out the storm.

“We’re expecting the percentages to rise this year,  but I’d like to hope that Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE will be affected less.”

And it’s not surprising that he’s expecting other universities to feel the pinch a bit more.

“At a careers conference last week, I chatted with careers heads from other universities and I have to say they sounded quite worried”.

I spoke, perhaps pre-emptively, to the careers departments of some of the universities with the lowest graduate employment ratings on the trusty Sunday Times Good University Guide. Unsurprisingly none were willing to state publicly that they were having sleepless nights over their graduates’ futures, but maybe someone should.

The government’s plan will likely provide highly-skilled opportunities to be snapped up by the graduates who were already destined for internships or entry-level jobs and leave the middle-ground of non-Russell  2:2 or even 2:1 degree-wielding citizens without much hope.

It’s, sadly, become a typical move from Labour, who flooded universities with graduates without really thinking about where they’d be going or informing them about what the realistic opportunities for graduate employment could be if the (now rose-tinted) period of economic boom were ever to fail. We have nothing but a few pockets of vocational training and everywhere the assumption that ‘any degree will do’, until, that is, you actually get yours and realise that going to university might have been little more than staving off unemployment (while accruing a healthy amount of debt) for a few years.

That (ear-bleedingly bad) 1997 Labour campaign song was by a band who, bravely, called themselves D:ream – well, all that optimism certainly seems like a mirage. Strange how we’re saying it all over again, though. Things can only get better.

Posted by Chris Baraniuk in Hot Money | January 15, 2009 11:27AM |