What should graduates expect?

What should graduates expect?

This week recruiters have announced that 65% of them plan to cut their student recruitment schemes. (see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/feb/11/skilled-jobs-graduates-recession also http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=405362&c=1) Years of graduate unemployment and discontent are sure to follow. For several years now the economy has failed to keep up with the ever growing number of graduates, in 2007 the average graduate salary fell. This highlights two long overdue realisations. Firstly, the promise that a degree will always increase a person’s salary upon entering employment is not necessarily true. Secondly, something must be done to help graduates realise their potential or they will fall into discontent and entry rates into higher education will fall in the coming generations. Many graduates will leave university this year and discover that employers expect them to become a temp on the same minimum wage of people with no qualifications. Is this what students spend several years of their life accruing debt for?

For years the government, quite rightly, has sought to increase the numbers of young people entering higher education. The promise of a well-paid job at the end of the course, which would rapidly repay the student debts accrued over three or four years, was the rational and encouragement for this. This led to a growth in the number of skilled workers in the economy, often skills learned at universities would become redundant in a workplace that has failed to change for decades. The nature of our current economy means that wherever possible jobs will be outsourced, temporary and, of course, as low paid as possible. Until a change occurs which results in more highly skilled and fairly remunerated jobs in the economy graduates will continue to enter low skilled and low paid jobs, not the fantastic careers that schools, careers services and politicians have misleadingly promised them for years. This emphasis an education to find a job is outdated. The reasons for entering higher education should focus on learning a discipline which the student enjoys, the learning of new concepts which will produce a free-thinking individual and the experience which, for many, is a vital of growing up. This requires a complete change in thinking from government, schools, parents and, not least, universities themselves. Education in itself is a great thing and many individuals are only able to truly know themselves once they have benefitted from the skills and knowledge they are gifted at university.

The rise not only in graduate unemployment, but the failure of jobs to meet expectation will create discontent and could cause future generations to shun the university. Many people who graduated in the same year as myself have been forced to take, what would normally be described as, unskilled jobs. There is clearly a failure in the university which does not prepare such students to enter the workplace in a position that matches their skills, but also in the economy in keeping pace with the increasing skills base of the workforce. There are, in short, too many graduates chasing too few graduate positions. How are recent graduates supposed to feel when the only work available is in shops or factories? They have often invested up to five years of their lives in further and higher education, only to emerge and occupy the same positions as their parents. It is clear that universities responsibility for their students should not simply end upon graduation. Graduate or alumni associations need to be created which can inform graduates of new opportunities, not only for employment, but also future training.

The situation in the employment sector has changed so much with the extension of university education that a degree is no longer a guarantee of a good job, as it once professed to be. A combination of correct experience and higher degrees need to be used so that graduates are able to compete in the work place. The current provision of both of these is based on severe inequality. Work experience and internships are very often allocated by parents securing positions for their children. A working class person has to work much harder to reach a top professional position than one who received private education, has parental connections and built up the network opportunities over their life in education. Postgraduate education opportunities are largely limited to those who possess the ready money to pay in advance for course or else had the cultural capital through their parents to attend an elite university. This double inequality ensures that the top and increasingly, any professional, positions within society are monopolised by people whose attainments are completely dependent on the accident of their birth.

The prospects of the average graduate are limited indeed. They have been sold a lie that gradation will open endless opportunity when in actual fact they are as disadvantaged as their parents, albeit in a more covert way. It is time for graduates to form up into groups and societies and demand equality of opportunity. Education, Education, Education was promised to this generation, but all it has brought is inequality, inequality, inequality. The dominant groupings in society find ever more devious ways of ensuring that they hold the top positions. It is time for graduates to form together and demand a change.