Source: The Conversation – UK
fizkes/Shutterstock Spend ten minutes talking to a soon-to-be graduate about their job search and you might come away convinced that a university degree has become a confidence trick. The class of 2025 spent the better part of a year sending hundreds of applications for a handful of replies.
The class of 2026 is now graduating into the same market and reporting similar experiences. Employers have warned of falls in entry-level hiring. The recent British Social Attitudes survey has found that a third of people surveyed thought that a degree “just isn’t worth the amount of time and money”.
The numbers do nothing to soften the picture. Youth unemployment among 16-to-24-year-olds reached 16.2% in the first quarter of 2026, the highest in more than a decade. Graduate hiring fell 8% from 2024 to 2025, the weakest year since the pandemic.
Employers are fielding an average of 140 applications for every vacancy, according to the Institute of Student Employers’ 2025 student recruitment survey.
The recent independent review for the Department for Work and Pensions counted nearly a million young people – about one in eight – as Neet (not in education, employment or training), and warned the figure could pass 1.25 million within five years.
For a young person sending CV after CV into the void, hearing that “it still pays to go to university” may sound, to put it mildly, unconvincing. But two things are happening at once. The level of graduate hiring has fallen sharply: fewer openings, longer searches, more graduates taking jobs below their qualification.
The relative benefit of a degree in securing work has held. That matters most in a downturn.
The value of a degree in finding work This is not a claim that the experience of looking for a graduate job is anything other than miserable right now, or that the misery is imagined.
It plainly is not. But the experience of the job search and the objective value of a university qualification are different things. The employment benefit of a degree is large. This is evident when comparing young graduates against young non-graduates entering the same labour market at the same time.
The most recent Graduate Outcomes survey tracked the 2022-23 leavers 15 months out, into the autumn of 2024. Their unemployment rate had crept up to 6%. Grim enough. But the Department for Education’s graduate labour market statistics for 2024 allows us to compare unemployment between graduates and their non-graduate peers of the same age.
Among 21- to 30-year-olds, graduate unemployment stood at 5.5%, against 8.1% for non-graduates, the latter at its highest since 2015. Even as the market softened, a young graduate was around a third less likely to be unemployed than a non-graduate the same age.
The degree did not fully insulate this cohort from a bad jobs market. It reduced their exposure by about a third — which is remarkable, and the key lesson to hold on to in this discussion.
A degree is often worth most when the market is worst: it helps you most exactly when you need it most. The relative benefit of a degree in securing work has held. Lee Charlie/Shutterstock The recent independent report on young people and work for the government has found that good qualifications remain one of the best defences against labour market detachment.
According to the interim report, most graduates who fall out of work are out only briefly: 57% of those not in education, employment or training have been out for under a year, against just 16% of those with no qualifications.
Lifetime financial benefit A degree is a 40-year asset bought at 21, and the market a graduate steps into at 22 is not the one they will work in at 40. When researchers modelled graduates’ earnings across the whole working life, they found the return is back-loaded.
The pre-tax salary advantage for men rises from around 5% more than those without a degree at 30 to more than 30% by 40, and keeps widening into the mid-40s. For women it starts higher — about 25% at 30 — and climbs above 40% by 40 before declining to 30–35% later in their careers.
Read more: Why a ‘rip-off’ degree might be worth the money after all – research study The raw lifetime earnings difference between graduates and non-graduates is about £430,000 for men and £260,000 for women.
Adjust for the fact that university-goers tend to start with stronger prior attainment and more advantaged backgrounds, then net off tax and loan repayments, and the gain settles at roughly £130,000 and £100,000 — around a fifth more over a career.
Substantial, but not a fortune. And it is an average, not a promise.
The same study estimates that about one in five graduates would have been better off financially had they not gone to university, with the weakest returns in subjects like creative arts and social care and the strongest in medicine, economics and law.
A degree improves your odds; it does not assure them. What’s more, when you graduate matters, not just whether you graduate.
Enter the labour market in a downturn and the first job, too often one that doesn’t recognise the value of your degree, tends to stick: graduates who start out underemployed are roughly three times as likely to still be underemployed three and a half years later.
A degree improves the odds of working, but it doesn’t guarantee the right work. Much of this will be cold comfort to the soon-to-be graduate sending off application number 200. The case for university was never that graduation guarantees a smooth landing, still less a windfall.
But even now – especially now – the odds still favour going to university.
Sean Brophy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/03/the-graduate-job-market-is-grim-right-now-but-the-data-says-university-is-still-worth-it/