9th August 2026
Over the past 50 years Britain has sent ever more young people into further and higher education. But has the country actually become more skilled or have we simply created a system where a degree is increasingly required to get a job that once needed no degree at all?.
There was a time when leaving school at 15 or 16 and going directly into work was entirely normal.
A young person could become an apprentice, learn a trade, work in an office, enter retail, banking, manufacturing or construction and acquire qualifications while earning money.
Today the route is very different.
For many young people, the expected journey is:
school → college → university → degree → job.
And sometimes, after all that education, the employer still has to train the new employee.
That raises an uncomfortable question:
Have we created an economy in which young people need more qualifications simply because employers have gradually raised the qualification requirements for jobs?
The university expansion
There is no question that access to higher education has expanded enormously.
In Scotland, the proportion of school leavers going into Higher Education was 42.3% in 2024-25 — the highest proportion since comparable records began in 2009-10, excluding the exceptional pandemic years. A further 26.0% went into Further Education. Together, almost seven in ten school leavers were in higher or further education three months after leaving school.
Nine months later, 40.2% were in Higher Education and another 22.1% were in Further Education. Employment accounted for 26.5%.
Those figures demonstrate how profoundly the transition from school to work has changed.
But they don't answer the most important question:
Is all this additional education producing better economic outcomes?
A degree has become a passport
One possible explanation for the growth in university education is that employers increasingly use qualifications as a screening mechanism.
Instead of asking:
"Can this person do the job?"
the recruitment process can begin with:
"Does this person have a degree?"
A degree then becomes a passport into employment rather than necessarily evidence that the person has been trained for the particular job.
This can produce qualification inflation.
If 20 applicants apply for a job and 15 have degrees, an employer may decide that a degree should become a requirement.
Once enough employers do that, young people who previously could have entered the occupation directly feel compelled to obtain a degree simply to compete.
The qualification becomes necessary because everybody else has one.
And then the employer trains them anyway
This is perhaps the most curious part.
A young graduate spends three or four years obtaining qualifications.
They then obtain a job.
The employer provides induction, technical training, company systems training, health and safety training, customer training and perhaps professional training.
In some occupations this is entirely appropriate.
University was never intended to provide every piece of job-specific training.
But if a degree is being demanded for a job where most of the useful skills are learned after recruitment, we should ask whether the education system is being used to perform the employer's selection process.
The young person pays the opportunity cost.
The taxpayer may subsidise the education.
The student may accumulate debt.
And the employer still has to train them.
Is that an efficient way to organise the workforce?
The forgotten alternative: learning while earning
Britain once had a much stronger culture of apprenticeships and workplace training.
A young person could enter an employer at 16 or 17, earn a wage and acquire skills at the same time.
There was a financial advantage too.
Instead of spending several years as a student, they were contributing to the economy while learning.
That route still exists, of course.
But university has acquired enormous cultural importance.
For some professions — medicine, law, engineering, teaching and many others — higher education is obviously essential.
The question concerns the jobs where a degree is now required mainly because it has become the conventional recruitment filter.
Was education ever partly used to keep young people out of unemployment?
This is where history becomes fascinating.
Scotland raised its school-leaving age from 15 to 16 on 1 September 1972.
The government knew that this would dramatically reduce the number of young people entering the labour market.
In February 1972, the government told employers that more than 250,000 young people who might otherwise have left school at 15 would remain in education for another year. Employers were encouraged to recruit and train more young people before the change took effect.
By 1973, Parliament was explicitly discussing whether the policy had reduced unemployment.
The government estimated that the number of school leavers had been reduced by 212,000 by summer 1973, but said it could not reliably calculate how much this had reduced unemployment. It argued that the improvement in the economy and increased job opportunities were the main reasons unemployment had fallen.
So it would be wrong to say that the school-leaving age was raised simply to manipulate unemployment figures.
But there is no doubt that keeping young people in education temporarily removes them from the pool of people looking for jobs.
That distinction matters.
The numbers can change without the economy changing
Imagine an economy with one million young people.
If 100,000 are unemployed, unemployment is high.
Now imagine that 50,000 of those young people are encouraged to remain in education.
The number officially unemployed can fall even though the number of people without jobs hasn't necessarily changed in the way ordinary people might imagine.
The young people haven't found jobs.
They have simply moved from the labour market into education.
That isn't necessarily bad.
Education may make them more productive later.
But it demonstrates why unemployment is not the same thing as the number of people who aren't working.
This matters even more today
The ONS makes an important distinction between unemployment and economic inactivity.
Someone is unemployed if they are without a job, available for work and actively seeking work.
Someone who isn't working but isn't looking for a job is generally classified as economically inactive.
That includes people who are:
students;
retired early;
looking after family or home;
long-term sick;
discouraged from seeking work;
or inactive for other reasons.
The distinction is statistically correct.
But it can sometimes make the health of the economy difficult for the public to understand.
Look beyond unemployment
The latest ONS figures show a UK employment rate of 75.1% for March-May 2026.
The unemployment rate was 4.9%.
But the economic inactivity rate for people aged 16-64 was 20.9%.
That is a crucial number.
More than one in five working-age people are economically inactive.
That doesn't mean they are all capable of working or should be working.
Far from it.
Many have perfectly legitimate reasons for being outside the workforce.
But if we want to understand the productive capacity of the economy, unemployment alone is clearly insufficient.
Long-term sickness changes the picture
This is particularly important because economic inactivity has increasingly been associated with long-term sickness.
The ONS estimates that the number of people economically inactive because of long-term sickness rose from around 2 million in 2019 to around 2.5 million in 2022.
More recent ONS data show the number of economically inactive people aged 16-64 at about 9.1 million in March-May 2026, equivalent to an inactivity rate of 20.9%.
So an economy can simultaneously report:
low unemployment
and
a very large number of people outside the workforce.
Those statements are not contradictory.
But the second figure may tell us much more about the economy's unused potential.
Students are part of the complication
There is another issue.
The more young people remain in education, the more people are technically outside the labour market.
That is not necessarily a problem.
A 20-year-old studying engineering full-time isn't economically inactive in the sense that society would normally understand the phrase "not contributing".
They are investing in future productive capacity.
But the statistics need to distinguish between:
people temporarily outside work because they are building skills
and
people permanently or semi-permanently outside the workforce.
Those are completely different economic problems.
Perhaps we need a new measure
Instead of concentrating so heavily on unemployment, policymakers could put greater emphasis on a broader measure of workforce participation.
Something like:
Working-age population
minus
people in employment
could give us a much more intuitive measure of how many people aren't currently working.
But even that needs qualification.
We would then want to separate the non-working population into categories:
Education
Retirement
Long-term sickness
Caring responsibilities
Unemployment and actively seeking work
Discouraged workers
Other inactivity
That would tell us considerably more about the state of the economy.
The real economic question
The important question isn't simply:
"How many people are unemployed?"
It is:
"How many people of working age are productively engaged in the economy, and why aren't the remainder working?"
That is a much more useful question.
If unemployment is 5% but millions of people are outside the workforce because of long-term sickness, the economy has a very different problem from one where unemployment is 8% but most of the working-age population is economically active.
What about the value of university?
This brings us back to higher education.
University remains enormously valuable for many people.
A doctor cannot become a doctor without extensive higher education.
An engineer needs advanced technical knowledge.
Scientists, teachers, lawyers and many professional occupations require substantial education.
The problem arises when we confuse education with employability.
A degree doesn't automatically mean somebody has the practical skills required by an employer.
And an absence of a degree doesn't automatically mean somebody lacks ability.
A highly capable 18-year-old may learn more about a particular industry through three years of apprenticeship and practical experience than through three years studying a general academic subject.
We need to stop treating one route as superior
Perhaps Britain needs a more balanced approach.
University for those who need university.
College for those who benefit from technical education.
Apprenticeships for those who learn best through work.
Employer training for genuinely job-specific skills.
And perhaps most importantly:
less obsession with qualifications for their own sake.
The question employers should ultimately be asking is:
"What can this person actually do?"
not simply:
"What certificates do they possess?"
A degree shouldn't become the new school-leaving certificate
There is a danger that university gradually becomes an extension of compulsory education.
School used to finish at 15.
Then 16 became normal.
Now large numbers of young people continue to 18 and beyond.
That may be entirely justified when the additional education produces valuable skills.
But if young people spend several extra years accumulating qualifications simply because employers have moved the entry requirement upwards, we may have created an expensive circular system.
More qualifications → higher employer requirements → more education → even higher qualification requirements.
At some point somebody needs to ask whether the system is actually producing more skills — or simply more certificates.
The missing measure
Perhaps Britain needs to change the way it talks about the labour market.
Every month we hear:
employment is up
or
unemployment is down.
But these figures don't tell the whole story.
We should also be asking:
How many working-age people are economically inactive?
How many are inactive because of long-term sickness?
How many are students?
How many want to work but aren't actively seeking?
How many jobs are being filled by people whose qualifications are substantially above the requirements?
How many employers are struggling to find people with practical skills?
How much training are employers providing after recruitment?
How many young people are entering work rather than accumulating another qualification?
Those questions would give us a much better picture of the real economy.
Perhaps the real measure is productive participation
Britain has become extraordinarily good at measuring unemployment.
But unemployment is only one part of the story.
A healthier economic measure might be productive participation — the proportion of the working-age population either working or undertaking education and training that is genuinely improving future employability.
That would allow us to distinguish between:
someone building skills for a future career
and
someone who has been outside the labour market for years.
It would also force policymakers to confront the uncomfortable questions surrounding qualifications, university expansion, long-term sickness and the transition from education into employment.
The question Britain should be asking
After half a century of expanding higher education, perhaps the debate should no longer be:
"How many young people can we get into university?"
It should be:
"How many young people can we get into productive careers?"
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
University should remain an important route into professional life.
But it should not automatically be considered the only respectable route.
And unemployment should remain an important economic indicator.
But it should never be mistaken for a complete measure of how much of Britain's potential workforce is actually being used.
The real challenge for Britain may therefore be much bigger than unemployment.
It is about skills, productivity, participation and whether we are making the best use of the people we have.
A country can have a low unemployment rate and still have millions of people outside the workforce.
It can have record numbers of graduates and still have employers complaining that new recruits lack practical skills.
And it can spend billions on education while employers spend billions more training people who have already spent years being educated.
Perhaps it is time to stop asking simply:
"How many people are unemployed?"
and start asking the much harder question:
"How many people are actually contributing to the productive economy — and why aren't more of them?"