The expansion of higher education, driven by the government's target to put 50% of young people into it, has happened too quickly for the labour market.
Oh, has it? Unfortunately for this exciting assertion, the facts and research into the field say otherwise, as documented ad nauseam by this blog. There is a more subtle point, though, which is iterated by Professor Peter Dolton.
"When you have rising graduate unemployment, the effects are felt worst by graduates of non-vocational subjects and graduates from less prestigious universities. That's going to get even worse in recession."
That's true. The big rise in university numbers has come through non-vocational qualifications which will be hit hard by the coming recruitment downturn. The kind of jobs which will be less in evidence will be many of those that require a degree, but with no particular discipline preference. These were perfect for the likes of the large number of psychologists and similar subjects who are leaving university. It will be much harder for them, and we need to help them.
But Dolton is then attributed as saying this:
According to Dolton, the government's target of getting 50% of adults into higher education was based on influential research looking at adult earnings over an entire career.
I sincerely hope he didn't say that, because it's rubbish. I suspect he didn't say that at all. Maybe the Government's conviction about earnings (and hence their evidence for the introduction of tuition fees and the level at which they should be set) was influenced by this research, but anecdotally the 50% target was not set in that way (I'm not going into what I know and how I know it, but really, it doesn't seem to have been that rigorous), and the imperative for getting more people into HE comes from a series of reports about the future structure of the labour market, the most recent of which is Leitch - emphatically not a piece of work dealing with the financial impact of degrees on future earnings.
Unless Dolton is arguing that we need a lower proportion of the population with degrees than comparable economies (and I doubt he is), I think he's actually giving evidence about something else. His later quotes suggest that. Dolton and Vignoles do a lot of research on rates of return and know their stuff (certainly better than I do), and I think it is now clear that the rate of returns on degrees were oversold in the 90s, but that does not mean that fewer people should be going to university as that is a different argument.
It is left to Richard Reeves to make the point. A degree is still going to be important in this labour market, because the simple fact is that the more skills you have, the better off you will be when it comes to looking for work.
These articles do serve one purpose - they warn that the job market is difficult and if it prompts students to start applying now, all the better. But if it puts people off applying for jobs when they are actually there then you have to question what good these pieces did.
It would not have been difficult to point out that the industries most seriously affected are a fraction of the total employment market.
It would not have been difficult to point out that most people stress that there are still jobs available, but that it might not be as easy to access them.
It would not have been hard to find people who graduated in the last recession (HELLO! I'M HERE!) to tell how they fared during the recession (badly - that's why I'm worried now) and afterwards (not so badly).
The problem is that, as I pointed out below, there are actually two separate but related problems which have been conflated as one. The first is the likely shortage of jobs next summer. This is serious and all that we can do is try to keep as aware of what is (or isn't) happening.
The second is the profound lack of confidence that students have in the employment market, and that isn't directly related to the number of jobs that are available, it's related to the number of jobs that they think are available. We can, and we have to, work on that - not by pretending all is well in Happy Sunshine Land, but by telling students about those opportunities that still exist and assuring them that their years of effort have not been for nothing. That's just got a bit harder.
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