Having criticised the media this morning, The Telegraph finally came up with a story.
As they have noted:
Graduates are facing the worst job market on record as vacancies evaporate under pressure from tax and technology.
Just 8,383 roles for university leavers were advertised in July, a 45pc drop on a year ago and the lowest since the figures were first compiled in 2016.
Their preferred solutions are, of course, tax cuts and denying people education. Neither is the answer, but denying there is a crisis is pretending reality does not exist. This crisis is real and has consequences.
There is also only one known solution, as it is clear that the private sector will not create the number of jobs required to engage younger people in the UK in work, and that is for the government to take on that job instead.
This is what Keynes always said was required in an economic downturn, and even if many of these young graduates' grandparents are sitting around noting how well off they are and how terrible it is that young people are too lazy to work (which complaint I hear too often, usually from people who look like Telegraph and Mail readers) the reality is that as far as younger peiople are coincerned we altready are well and triule in recession.
They do not need another training scheme.
They don't want a six-month fix.
They want long-term thinking and commitment.
And what they most especially want is something worthwhile, and what they know is that if existing jobs were so easy to replace with AI, then either the jobs were not worth doing, or the employers are too indifferent to their staff to want to work for.
Of the two, I think the second might be more important. When I graduated, we had a country still populated by employers who thought about long-term value generation, even if not all of them were very good at it.
Now we have a country where most large employers focus only on short-term cash generation.
That change of emphasis has massive consequences. Young people who realise their employer will ditch them at the first opportunity cannot get excited about investing in work they know they are destined not to do. They want to add value. They want to create. That's what I hear.
Now, how will the government do that?
How is it going to create housing?
How is it going to manage the environment?
How is it going to build the facilities people need to live well in this world?
How is it going to deliver a sustainable future, in other words?
It can do those things, but only if it accepts that it is its job to do so.
It will solve unemployment at the same time.
It is really not hard to join up the dots here. Unless, of course, you are in government, when it appears to be impossible. And why? Because of all the neoliberals screaming in politicians' ears, from the Treasury to the Telegraph and onwards. They are the impediment to young people. Money is not. We can always create that, and people are ready, waiting and wanting to get on with it. Only political willingness is missing.
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Hear hear.
a couple of typos in sentence before your first set of bullet points
Thanks.
I can’t see the typos, but I never can…
Might the obvious but “officially” unstated lack/avoidance of maintenance and improvement of both the material and sevice facets of our society, such as potholes and dentist-finding-difficulties, indicate/scream that we need to employ more people?
Might one of the many deceits of Austerity/Neoliberalism be the determination to avoid “deep competition”, one form of which involves the private sector and the state sector and pretend that “shallow” competition between cartel linked private sector entitities is genuinely competitive?
Thank you and well said, Richard.
I would say it’s the same at the other end, a barbell.
Further to Richard’s conclusion, over the week-end, France’s leftist LFI held its annual conference and presidential campaign launch. It was great to hear what Richard often writes about, money not being a constraint, but resources are, getting an airing, including from the former head of Lazard France, Matthieu Pigasse, sic.
One wonders if this community’s French contingent, AN Rigaut and Geof, picked up on that most welcome development.
It would be good if they did
Companies see no further than the quarterly balance sheet, and governments no further than the next election. Neither are interested in the long-term consequences of graduate jobs disappearing, because that’s further than their thinking will permit.
Totally agree. My eldest son graduated 2 years ago and hasn’t been able to find a job in his chosen area which is IT. Has applied for many jobs and has gained interviews but not offers. He is working, fortunately, but whilst it is a full time role it is on a contract and so not permanent. He has a colleague who is an IT graduate and has had the same difficulty when looking for jobs.
Sadly, the laziness trope has fully taken hold with some of our relatives.
Craig
Some people are deeply unkind.
Good luck to your son.
I had started to reply to this comment with an anecdote of the experience of a close friend of mine. It was only later that I realised that the situation he was in occurred at the tail-end of the post war /welfare state/ Keynesian economy. So maybe things are different these days? It was 1971-a Chemistry Phd and no prospects of a job in his field in the UK. So the ‘erstwhile colonies’ beckoned and he found a teaching post in a Nigerian University. For many reasons this did not work out and he returned to this country to live with parents and other relatives while he searched for employment…. it was almost a job in itself…. but he was eventually able to find work in an an unrelated field, but which used the ‘people skills’ he had acquired. He has been able to continue with his career, but without any reference to his original degrees. All I can add is that a degree should not constrain your life choices any more than your GCSE or A-level results should do…
Thank you
I am not sure that we can have people working for more years before retirement. and have jobs for people after they have just left school/college/university as well.
Surely it would be better to have young people in jobs creating a future and older ones on pensions than old ones working and young ones on benefits?
I worked five years longer than I had expected and the final 3 years were in an entry level post, much more suitable to a school leaver. I had to take it after a long and serious illness. My boss told me they preferred older people because ‘they kniwhow to work’. That’s because we had the opportunity to learn to work.
Much to agree with
Might the recent and current cruel and inefficient socio-economic policy of Neoliberalism be a result of the following?
1) A lack of civic virtue in those controlling most political paries
2) An mass educational set up which results in some 90% of the population being passively but effectively taught neither to question nor to use analytical thinking
3) A main stream media which enegetically enables the ruling politico-economic clique, which incldes big donors, to deceive and mislead the citizenry
P. S. Civic Virtue is “the dedication of citizens to the common welfare of their
country, putting public interest ahead of personal gain.” (From A. I. Overview)
The solution seems clear to me. The gov should announce a five-year plan to train and pay apprentices in all building trades and some engineering sectors. It will involve around 250,000 young people, thousands of businesses and hundreds of FE colleges. It doesn’t really matter how much it will cost, because the cost of not doing this will be much greater. The apprentices will have to be paid an attractive wage, businesses will need to be subsidised, and FE colleges may need to hire staff. The sooner the better, it cannot wait.
The torygraph article is poor in the statistics as it says “Competition for jobs also rose with jobseekers per vacancy rising to 2.14, up from 1.93 a year ago” but this is totally irrelevant to the graduate jobs market which is what the article is meant to be about – that statistic is the overall broad aggregate of total jobseekers ÷ total vacancies . The latest ISE figures for graduate applications (2024/25 recruitment cycle, reported in 2025–2026) are Average: ~140 applications per graduate vacancy. Presumbly now it will be over 200!