By Grace Bourne, Third Year, English
University, depending on who you talk to, often falls into two categories. There are those who study from nine to five, for whom their degree is a purely academic pursuit, a stepping stone to an ambitious career. Then there are those who after a couple of minutes of conversation you realise attend university for the social benefits, studying a degree in something almost entirely irrelevant to what they want to do later on, or sometimes even a degree that they’re entirely uninterested in. For both groups however, in the context of a graduate job crisis making headlines almost daily, university is now being questioned as a potentially futile, and inordinately expensive, exercise. Even for those who take their degrees incredibly seriously, is there much use to a degree in 2026?
For a lot of us at school, university was framed as the inevitable next step for anyone getting average A level grades, and for most it was the only option presented. However, in the midst of what has been coined “the graduate jobpocalypse”, this “inevitable next step” is being thrown into question. According to the Institute of Student Employers’ (ISE) annual student recruitment survey, employers of graduates are now reporting receiving more than 1.2 million applications for ‘just under 17,000 graduate vacancies. Furthermore, the average employer was by 2024 receiving ‘140 applications per graduate job, a 59% increase on the previous year.’ In the 2024/2025 academic year ‘there were 2.86 million students at UK higher education institutions and around 765,000 applications for full-time undergraduate places were made through UCAS in 2025, 8,000 more than in 2024. Are there frankly too many graduates, making a degree an inherently less valuable achievement despite the amount of effort and work put in remaining the same?
I spoke to Eric who graduated from the University of Oxford in July 2025. He explained the ‘endless process of sending off what felt like a hundred applications a day’ and being made to feel like he had ‘no hope of getting a job’ despite three years of intense work and good grades. Eric was lucky and has managed to find a job in recent months but told me that he has friends who ‘almost a year after graduating are still unemployed and still waking up every day to the bleak cycle of job applications and rejection emails.’ Eric has been battling with the same core question as I have while writing this article; if the graduate job market is flooded with graduates, making it feel impossible to get a job, is the work done at university, and the money spent really worth it?
The Guardian has published a report showing that ‘almost half of all jobs lost since Labour came to power were among under-25s’ and that ‘youth unemployment is running at 15.3%, the highest level outside the Covid pandemic since 2015.’ The harsh reality facing gen Z is that the job crisis is universal and unavoidable, degree or otherwise. In fact, the employment rate for graduates is still considerably higher than for non-graduates. The government statistics for 2024 showed that employment for graduates was 87.6% compared to 68% for non-graduates, and the unemployment rate was 3.1% for graduates compared to non-graduates.
‘As a society, a high number of graduates still seems to be paying off, and as individuals, students on the whole do still seem to be benefitting from the bridge between school and adulthood.’
The answer in terms of objective employability, is that a degree is still worth it. It signals a prestige to potential employers which in undeniable and is still a leg up in an increasingly competitive fight for fewer job vacancies. The question each of us then have to ask ourselves is other than a higher chance of being employed what are we gaining out of a degree? In recent months, chancellor Rachel Reeves has been forced to re-evaluate the controversial student loans system, particularly the plan 2 student loans. This has initiated a conversation about the financial value of university. Professor Bobby Duffy from the King’s College London’s argues that ‘it’s a complex area…but on average you still earn more over your lifetime than the costs of going to university and the lost earnings [while studying].’
Beyond the financial argument however, Duffy goes on to make the case that ‘there’s substantial evidence of independent benefits on skills development, self-esteem, sense of wellbeing, civic engagement and openness to diversity’ as a result of university. As a society, a high number of graduates still seems to be paying off, and as individuals, students on the whole do still seem to be benefitting from the bridge between school and adulthood. We have all seen the people who turn up to a lecture halfway through, once in a blue moon, and those you’ve seen in the exam hall that you don’t even recognise from seminars. One has to question whether university is actually academically benefitting them in the slightest, but arguably the experience still retains value. Learning how to be a tenant, how to engage in extracurriculars and being free from the strict constraints of school without feeling like you’re navigating adulthood completely on your own are all valuable lessons. This is of course an inherently privileged thing to do, as the average loan after university is £53,000 and being able to manage that amount of debt just to have the experience of university is incredibly expensive and you have to be in a very financially fortunate position to do so.
Cara Hene
Tony Blair’s ambition that 50% of young people go to university has been achieved, but that means we have to navigate the consequences of a high graduate population. A significant problem with this analysis is that new forms of higher education such as degree level apprenticeships continue to be undervalued and therefore fairly untried. Degree level apprenticeships are on the rise, from 13% in 2017/2018 to 40% in 2024/2025, with 122,000 Degree level apprenticeships being recorded in 2023/2024. But this is minimal compared to the number of graduates. In the current system a university degree remains strong, but in an alternative world where degree level apprenticeships are more valued and more students are encouraged to pursue them, the entire analysis of value for graduates would have to shift.
Featured image: Epigram / Lilja Nassar
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