Now they tell us. Now my kids are lumbered with £60,000 of debts they will never be able to repay, we learn there aren’t any graduate jobs anyway.
Thanks to Reeves’s destruction of the economy, university education is no longer a pathway to a better life with graduate jobs today as rare as a decent IQ on the Labour benches.
Every parent who wants a good life for their children will be as shocked as I was by a stat from James Reed, the chief executive of the giant recruiter Reed.
This was it; three years ago, he had 180,000 graduate jobs on his books. Today, that number is 55,000. What possible use is a media degree today?
Or a degree in psychiatry or philosophy. Your children or grandchildren might as well go straight to a call centre at 18 rather than taking a degree, which will usher them straight to a job centre.
I wish I hadn't read that. Rachel Reeves is stiffing the middle class and pinning it on AI - Kelvin MacKenzie
|Getty Images
There was a throwaway line from Mr Reed which alarmed me almost as much as the stats. He suggested middle-class families should no longer be pushing their kids towards Durham or Bristol, but instead suggest that manual labour was the only guarantee of work.
Look, the price of plumbers, decorators, sparkies is off the scale, and the nation needs more of these skills, but to suddenly discover that education is not a pathway to a better life is really disturbing.
I’m sure Starmer and Co. will be selling the story that the decline of graduate jobs is due to AI. Not true, much more likely NI. Why on earth should anybody hire a youngster who's damned expensive through minimum pay and increased national insurance and whose main skill is drinking heavily in university bars and not throwing up?
My longtime friend runs a smallish accountancy business, and he tells me that all his clients, who’re not big, are either laying people off or have frozen hiring.
Tech obviously plays a role, but the cost of employing people when there’s no growth is simply not a runner. In fact, the only growth under this government is the amount of lies being told. A classic from Starmer was that he knew about the huge cache of emails showing Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein, but didn’t read them.
Reminded me of James Murdoch, the family dud, who said he received an email telling him about the hacking at the News of the World, opened it, but never read it.
Amazing, he lasted as long as he did as the chairman. Somebody should explain to Starmer (and to Murdoch) that the whole technological point of emails is to read them. I digress.
Only last week, research showed that graduate hiring by the top 100 employers fell by 14.6 per cent last year, the steepest annual fall since the financial crisis of 2009.
PWC has announced it will reduce its graduate intake by 200 this summer, down from 1,500 to 1,300. PWC has been No.1 in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers for 17 of the past 27 years.
The reality is that white collar jobs are in the firing line. If you’re middle-class and middle management, there is a very good chance you will have a bullet by your name. That’s not unusual.
In banking, once you hit 50, expect to be gone within a couple of years. But this is the first time in my lifetime when you can be written off at 18.
An English degree is clearly of use if you are going into teaching, but no use at all if looking for a job in commercial life. So, for the future, it’s absolutely no use for your child or grandchild saying they are going to university; they need to have a plan. Not just how many glasses of rosé they can drink in a night.
What use is that degree going to be when job hunting? The first thing that should happen is that all media departments should be closed.
Media firms can train journalists, broadcasters, camera operators, producers, ten times more quickly and efficiently than universities.
That will be true of almost every job. Hospitals should train doctors, not colleges. Instead of five to seven years, it could all be done in three. No trainee accountant or lawyer should waste their time at university.
James Dyson was miles ahead on this issue, setting up a uni for engineering attached to his company so that he had a pipeline of well-trained employees.
I’m afraid that tech will play its part in your kids finding it difficult, but it’s not helped by the hopeless abilities of the Chancellor and the Prime Minister when it comes to economic matters.
I see the OBR is leaking it out that productivity is nowhere near where they estimated, and the effect there will be another £10billion to find come Budget Day.
That’s on top of the £30billion that has been wasted on welfare, money for state workers and anybody who came from across the water with their hand out.
Add that to inflation sticking at an unhealthy 3.8 per cent, and the little-reported official figures showing the state sector added 95,000 jobs while private industry employment has actually fallen. How bad is that?
These are tough times due to Labour; they are made immeasurably worse. How bad is it that you may be in a job, but your children, no matter how hard they tried at university, may not be? That should hang round Reeves’s neck.