Decades of “university for all” rhetoric is hurting students whose degrees no longer pay off, and taxpayers who are stumping up the cost, writes John O’Connell

As A-Level results land this week, hundreds of thousands of teenagers will be weighing the next step in their lives. For decades, students have been pushed a comfortable fiction: go to university, earn more, live better. It has been the default advice of parents, teachers and ministers alike, and for a time it was broadly true. But the world has shifted. The graduate premium is fading, job markets are crowded, and not every degree now leads to a more prosperous life.

As campaigner Paul Wiltshire has discovered, the brutal truth is becoming clear: around 160,000 of last year’s 495,000 university intake will earn the same as, or less than, non-graduates. Among younger graduates aged 21–30, the average premium over non-graduates has fallen from 35 per cent in 2007 to just 21 per cent today. Across the working-age population it has dropped from 50 per cent to 36 per cent.

Too many graduates have........

© City A.M.