9th August 2026
For many people now over 50, the route into a career was simple: leave school, get a job, learn the trade and work your way up.
Today, young people are increasingly expected to obtain qualifications before they can even get through the employer's front door.
Now, with universities facing falling international student numbers and some reducing entry requirements, has Britain created an education system that increasingly needs people to stay in education simply to keep the system going?
There is nothing wrong with higher education.
Doctors need medical degrees.
Engineers need advanced technical education.
Scientists, teachers, lawyers and many other professionals require years of specialist study.
The question is not whether universities are valuable.
They clearly are.
The question is whether Britain has gradually turned the university degree into the new school-leaving certificate — something many young people feel they need simply to get started.
The world many over-50s remember
For a large proportion of today's over-50s, the route into working life was very different.
A young person might leave school and start work at 16 or 17.
They could become:
an apprentice;
an office junior;
a bank clerk;
a sales assistant;
a factory worker;
a tradesperson;
a civil servant;
a technician;
or a junior employee in a professional organisation.
They learned while working.
They earned a wage.
They gained experience.
And if they wanted to progress, they could undertake further education, professional examinations or employer-sponsored training.
Qualifications often followed employment rather than preceded it.
That system was far from perfect.
But it did have one enormous advantage.
Young people were contributing to the economy while learning.
The education revolution
Over the past half-century Britain has moved in a very different direction.
More young people have gone into further and higher education, and university has become a normal part of the transition from school to employment.
In Scotland, for example, 42.3% of school leavers entered Higher Education in 2024-25, while another 26% entered Further Education. That means almost seven in ten school leavers were initially going into higher or further education.
This is a remarkable transformation.
But it raises another question:
What happens when almost everybody has a qualification?
When qualifications become filters
Suppose an employer receives 200 applications for a job.
If 150 applicants have degrees, the employer can easily decide that a degree should become a minimum requirement.
The qualification may have little to do with the actual work.
But it provides a convenient way of reducing the number of applicants.
The result can become a cycle:
More graduates → higher qualification requirements → more young people going to university → even more graduates.
Eventually a degree can become less about demonstrating specialist knowledge and more about demonstrating that somebody has reached a certain level of education.
That is qualification inflation.
The strange situation facing graduates
There is another curious feature of modern employment.
A young person can spend three or four years at university.
They graduate.
They apply for a job.
They are accepted.
And the employer then says:
"Now we'll train you."
The company may have to teach them its computer systems, processes, products, customers, compliance requirements, management procedures and practical skills.
There is nothing unusual about employers training new recruits.
They have always done so.
But it raises the question of whether some university degrees are increasingly being used as a pre-employment screening mechanism, rather than as direct preparation for the job itself.
What happened to learning while earning?
This is where older generations can see the difference particularly clearly.
A 17-year-old entering employment could spend the next five years learning.
By 22, that person might have:
five years of work experience;
professional qualifications;
practical knowledge;
workplace contacts;
and savings.
A graduate entering employment at 22 might have:
a degree;
little or no full-time work experience;
student debt or other education costs;
and several years before becoming fully productive in their chosen occupation.
Neither route is automatically better.
But we should at least ask whether Britain has become too heavily weighted towards one of them.
University has also become big business
Universities don't exist simply as educational institutions.
They are now major economic organisations employing thousands of people, maintaining enormous estates and depending heavily on student income.
That makes student numbers extremely important.
And this is where the current pressure on international recruitment becomes significant.
International students have become an important source of university income because overseas students can pay substantially higher fees than domestic students.
But international recruitment has weakened.
Recent reporting has highlighted the financial pressure this is creating for universities, with some institutions responding by becoming more flexible about domestic admissions and accepting students with lower grades than would previously have been expected.
That doesn't mean British universities are suddenly lowering standards across the board.
They aren't.
But where institutions have expensive buildings, staff and courses that need students to fill them, the financial incentive to recruit becomes obvious.
The uncomfortable question
If fewer overseas students are available, one obvious solution is to attract more domestic students.
But what happens when there aren't enough students with the traditional entry grades?
One response is to widen access.
That can be entirely legitimate.
Students develop at different rates and examination grades are not a perfect measure of future ability.
But another question remains:
Are some universities increasingly competing for students because they need the income those students bring?
If so, the education system begins to look rather different.
The university isn't simply asking:
"Who is best qualified to study this course?"
It may also have to ask:
"How do we fill the places we have available?"
The danger of confusing education with employment
One of Britain's biggest mistakes may have been assuming that more education automatically means a more productive economy.
It doesn't necessarily.
Education can improve productivity.
But productivity comes from people having the right skills for the work they actually do.
A country could have record numbers of graduates and still have shortages of:
electricians;
plumbers;
mechanics;
construction workers;
engineers;
technicians;
care workers;
agricultural workers;
specialist manufacturers.
A degree cannot replace every practical skill.
Britain still needs apprentices
This is why apprenticeships remain important.
An apprentice can learn technical skills while working.
The employer gets somebody who is developing skills in the real workplace.
The apprentice earns money.
And the economy gets another productive worker.
The challenge is to make vocational education genuinely attractive rather than allowing it to become viewed as the route for people who were "not academic enough" for university.
That attitude has done considerable damage.
A highly skilled electrician, engineer, mechanic or technician can be every bit as valuable to the economy as someone with an academic degree.
In some circumstances, they may be considerably harder to replace.
Has university become the new school?
There is an even bigger cultural question.
Once university becomes the expected route for large numbers of young people, it effectively becomes another stage of education after school.
Instead of:
School → work
we have:
School → college → university → work.
For some young people that is exactly the right route.
For others it may represent three or four additional years before they discover what they actually want to do.
And there is a financial cost.
The individual may incur borrowing.
The taxpayer supports the higher education system.
The family may provide additional support.
And the economy loses several years in which the individual could otherwise have been working.
That cost may be justified if the resulting education produces valuable skills.
But if the degree is mainly being used to obtain a job that could have been entered without it, the calculation becomes much less convincing.
The school-leaving age provides an interesting historical lesson
Britain has already used education as a way of changing the transition between school and employment.
Scotland's school-leaving age was raised from 15 to 16 in 1972.
At the time, the government acknowledged that this would keep hundreds of thousands of young people in education who might otherwise have entered the labour market.
In 1972, Parliament was told that more than 250,000 young people who might otherwise have left school at 15 would remain for another year. (api.parliament.uk)
The following year MPs were even asking how much the change had reduced unemployment.
The government did not claim that the reduction in unemployment was directly caused by the higher school-leaving age, but it acknowledged that the number of young people entering the labour market had been substantially reduced. (api.parliament.uk)
That history matters.
It shows that the number of people officially looking for work can be influenced by how long young people remain in education.
The unemployment figure doesn't tell the whole story
This brings us back to the wider labour-market question.
The unemployment rate measures people who don't have a job but are available for work and actively seeking it.
It does not include everyone who isn't working.
The ONS distinguishes unemployment from economic inactivity.
And the scale of economic inactivity is considerable.
In March-May 2026, the UK employment rate for people aged 16-64 was around 75.1%, unemployment was 4.9%, while economic inactivity was 20.9%. (ons.gov.uk)
That means unemployment alone provides a very incomplete picture of the amount of working-age capacity not currently being used.
Some of those people are students.
Some are retired.
Some are caring for relatives.
Some are long-term sick.
Some may want work but aren't actively looking.
These categories matter enormously to the economy.
Perhaps Britain needs a broader measure
Imagine two countries.
Country A has unemployment of 5%, but 21% of working-age people are economically inactive.
Country B has unemployment of 7%, but only 10% are economically inactive.
Which economy is healthier?
The answer isn't obvious.
Country A might have a serious problem with people being outside the workforce because of long-term sickness.
Country B might simply have more people actively moving between jobs.
Yet the headline unemployment rate could suggest that Country A is doing better.
This is why Britain needs to look beyond the unemployment rate.
The real question is productive participation
Perhaps the more important statistic is:
How many people are productively engaged in the economy?
That should include people working and, arguably, people undertaking education or training that genuinely improves their future contribution.
It should also identify why the remainder are outside the workforce.
The distinction matters because a 20-year-old studying engineering is very different economically from a 50-year-old who has been unable to work for several years because of ill health.
Both may be economically inactive in the statistical sense.
They are not remotely the same economic problem.
Are we over-qualifying people?
The answer may be yes in some occupations, but certainly not across the economy.
Britain has not produced too many educated people.
Education is valuable.
The problem is that we may have produced a system where formal qualifications are sometimes used as a substitute for assessing ability, experience and potential.
That can disadvantage people who are capable but don't have the right certificates.
It can also encourage young people to spend years obtaining qualifications simply because they believe employers expect them.
Meanwhile, employers complain about skills shortages and then have to train new recruits.
That is a strange economic arrangement.
What should change?
Perhaps the answer is not fewer universities.
It is more routes into successful careers.
A young person should be able to choose between:
University
College
Apprenticeship
Employer training
Work followed by further education
without any of those routes being automatically regarded as superior.
Employers should also be encouraged to ask:
"What can this person become?"
rather than simply:
"What qualifications does this person already have?"
That could open employment to capable people who have been filtered out by increasingly demanding qualification requirements.
A degree should mean something
There is also a danger for universities themselves.
If a degree becomes almost universal, its value as a distinguishing qualification inevitably changes.
The more people possess a degree, the less useful it becomes as a simple way of separating applicants.
That can trigger another round of qualification inflation.
Employers then start demanding postgraduate qualifications.
Then professional qualifications.
Then experience.
And eventually young people can find themselves collecting qualifications simply to reach the starting line.
That is not necessarily a sign of a more skilled economy.
It may simply be a sign of a more complicated recruitment process.
The real test
Perhaps Britain's education system should ultimately be judged by what happens after education.
Not simply:
How many people entered university?
But:
How many entered productive careers?
Not simply:
How many degrees were awarded?
But:
What skills did those graduates acquire?
And not simply:
How low is unemployment?
But:
How many people of working age are contributing to the economy, and why are the others not?
Those are much harder questions.
But they may be the questions that matter.
The next generation needs choice, not pressure
Going to university should remain an excellent choice for millions of young people.
But it should be a choice.
It should not become something young people feel compelled to do simply because society has gradually moved the qualification goalposts.
The same applies to employers.
If a job genuinely requires a degree, then demand one.
If it doesn't, perhaps employers should stop using a degree as an automatic filter.
And if universities are lowering entry requirements because they need students to fill places, we should ask whether the country is producing graduates because the economy needs them — or because the education system needs the students.
That is a very different question.
Britain may not have too many graduates.
It may have too few alternative routes into good careers.
And perhaps that is the real lesson from the experience of the last 50 years.
For the generation now over 50, further education was often something you could return to after starting a career.
For today's young people, it is increasingly something they are expected to complete before they can start one.
Perhaps the future should combine the best of both systems:
learn, work, earn, gain experience — and keep learning throughout your career.
That could produce something more valuable than a nation of degree holders.
It could produce a genuinely skilled workforce.