Monday 08 June 2026 10:00 pm
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Monday 08 June 2026 11:48 am
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For nearly half of all university courses, those in the bottom quarter of the cohort end up earning less than minimum wage five years on from graduating, according to a new report on the outcomes crisis in higher education. The think tank Policy Exchange has found that rampant grade inflation and an explosion in university admissions have led to young people looking at grim career prospects despite being saddled with tens of thousands of pounds of debt. Graduates in sociology, as well as creative and performing arts degrees, are faced with the bleakest job prospects. Report authors have called for dramatically fewer university places to be offered, alongside a freeze on fees and scrapping the real interest rate on loans. Elsewhere, Policy Exchange has pushed for caps on the number of top grades that universities can dish out, alongside tougher new entry standards for school leavers vying for places. Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, has backed the report, slamming a higher education establishment which leaves grads with “large debts, limited teaching time and poor employment prospects”. The Tory frontbencher added that the sector has become “unfair and demoralising” for young people struggling to find work, having previously critiqued the “shoddy deal” faced for students in the UK. Graduate hiring hell The report comes at a torrid time for university leavers, with fresh revelations that only 57 per cent of graduates are in full-time work within 15 months of leaving university. Despite 30 per cent of graduates now being awarded a first class degree – up from 13 per cent two decades ago – thousands of applicants are now scrapping for vanishingly few graduate jobs in a turbulent market. Jumpstart, a jobs platform which connects young talent to start ups, told City AM back in February that it receives around 1,000 CVs each month and has a less than one per cent acceptance rate. One in ten students set to finish university this summer are set to flee the UK’s job market to look for opportunities abroad. The end of Tony Blair’s university dream? Tony Blair famously called for half of Britain’s school leavers to go to university, in a now infamous pledge that has reorientated higher education into a highly commercialised sector with dubious outcomes for graduates. Lord Glasman, the founder of the influential ‘Blue Labour’ pressure group, said that the report “exposes the complete disaster of the last three decades of university policy”. “Mass expansion and marketisation have seen numbers soar, standards collapse and the proportion of Firsts go through the roof – while the construction and manufacturing industries have been starved of the skilled labour our country really needs.”Baroness Deech, who used to run St Anne’s College Oxford, criticised the “marketisation” and “uncontrolled expansion” of the university sector, with students nudged towards seeing themselves as “consumers”.
