There is a particular British ritual that recurs every few years, usually when the graduate employment figures land. Someone senior announces that too many young people are going to university, that we have neglected the noble trades, that Germany does this so much better. Ministers nod. A commission is announced. Nothing happens, and three years later we do it again.
John Burn-Murdoch has poured cold water on the whole performance in the Financial Times, and his argument is that the education system is not the problem. The economy is.
Britain expanded higher education fast, but so did everyone else. What is distinctive is not our graduate numbers — it is what happened to graduate wages afterwards. Comparable countries expanded at a similar rate without watching the return on a degree get squeezed the way ours has. Median wages for graduates in their late twenties are lower in real terms than they were fifteen years ago, and one recent cohort study puts the college wage premium at 25 as having fallen from 18% to 8%.
You cannot explain a British-specific outcome with a cause common to everybody. If mass higher education inevitably devalued degrees, the Dutch and the Danes would be having this conversation too. They aren't, because their economies kept producing jobs that use what graduates learned. Ours didn't. Britain now has around 59% of graduates in non-graduate jobs — a figure beaten only by Greece and Estonia, and roughly six times the rate in Germany or the Netherlands.
The same logic dismantles the other half of the ritual. We are told non-graduates are held back by our threadbare technical training, and it's true that FE has been starved for decades. But look at the comparison honestly: German factory workers out-earn their British counterparts by up to 50%, and that gap is not a story about qualifications. It's a story about capital investment, sectoral bargaining, and firms that compete on productivity rather than on how cheaply they can hire.
Meanwhile, a poorly-educated American in a dynamic labour market can end up earning roughly what the average, better-schooled British worker earns. Whatever else that tells us, it is not that the problem is the classroom.
The appeal is obvious. Education reform is cheap, visible, and blames nobody currently in power. You can announce a new qualification, rebrand a diploma, commission a review of vocational parity, and be photographed in a workshop wearing a hi-vis vest.
The alternative — admitting that two decades of flat productivity, chronic under-investment and a labour market that has grown fat on cheap labour are the actual cause — implicates the entire political economy. It requires industrial strategy, patient capital, and an honest conversation about why British firms would rather hire another warm body than buy a machine. Far easier to tell an eighteen-year-old she has made a poor consumer choice.
There is a cruelty in this that goes beyond the analytical error. We spent thirty years telling young people that education was the route to security, then built an economy that couldn't honour the promise, and are now blaming them for believing us. The degrees are fine. The jobs are missing. Reforming the former will not conjure the latter — though it will keep an awful lot of people busy pretending otherwise.
