On the day the government admitted the ladder only had one rung, it’s worth asking who we talked into climbing it — and who it left holding the debt.

On 28 July, the Prime Minister stood up and said, “From today, Britain will value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap.” Technical routes from fourteen. Parity of esteem between the academic and the vocational. Ofsted rewired to reward schools for preparing young people for work, not just for exams. Andy Burnham hung the whole thing on one number from Alan Milburn’s review: more than a million sixteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds now not in education, employment or training. A lost generation, he called it.

I think it’s welcome and overdue. But strip away the podium language and notice what it actually is: the establishment quietly conceding something a lot of us have felt in our bones for years. For thirty years we ran an experiment. We told almost every young person in the country that there was one respectable destination — a degree — and that everything else was what you did if you couldn’t manage one. The announcement is the sound of that assumption crumbling.

So let me say “the thing” plainly, and then spend the rest of this piece defending it, because it’s the kind of claim that’s easy to make badly. University has been oversold, and for a meaningful minority of people it has been an actively bad deal. Not worthless. Not a con for everyone. Oversold. There’s a difference, and that’s where the whole argument lives.

The obsession

Start with how we got here, because it wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t evenly distributed.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, university stopped being a choice and became a default — but only for some people, and that’s the part we don’t say out loud. In a certain kind of household, the question was never whether but where. Not going wasn’t a decision you could make; it was a decision that had gone wrong. The pressure was aspirational, well-meant, and almost entirely one-directional: up the academic ladder, because that was where the respectable people were.

And here’s the cruel symmetry. The same sorting machine that pushed the middle-class kid toward university pushed the working-class kid away from it — or, just as often, toward a version of it that didn’t pay off. We built a single hierarchy of esteem and then let a child’s postcode and parents’ jobs do most of the choosing. The OECD’s work on teenage career readiness is blunt about this: young people’s aspirations are shaped heavily by social background and are frequently misaligned with where the jobs actually are. Left alone, early choice doesn’t liberate talent. It launders class into “preference” and hands you the result with a straight face.

So when people talk about university and social mobility, I want to hold two true things at once. The expansion did move people. Hundreds of thousands went who never would have, and for a great many of them it genuinely changed their lives. I won’t wave that away, and anyone arguing the pure-nostalgia case for the old days hasn’t thought it through. But for some, mobility was sold as opportunity for all, and those aren’t the same promise. When you make one path the only respectable one, you don’t widen the door. You just make everyone who doesn’t walk through it feel like they failed.

The apathy

Now watch what happens when the promise stops delivering, because attitudes have shifted and the data shows it.

A YouGov poll this September found that two-thirds of graduates don’t believe their degree was worth the cost. The British Social Attitudes survey found a third of people flatly think a degree isn’t worth the time and money. That is not a fringe grumble; that is the customer telling you the product has drifted from the price. And they’re voting with their feet as well as their mouths — HEPI’s twenty-year look at the student experience found that in 2006, 63% of undergraduates attended all their scheduled classes. By 2025, it was under half.

I’ll be fair about that last number, because it’s not clean. Some of that fall is students working part-time jobs to survive. Some is recorded lectures and long commutes. It doesn’t prove the teaching got worse. But it sits alongside something we’ve known for years — that a large passive lecture, if the teaching is weak, is one of the least effective ways adults learn anything. So the marginal student is now paying record fees for a format the evidence questions, and increasingly not showing up. That’s not apathy in the lazy sense. That’s a rational response to a deal that stopped adding up.

The debt

Which brings us to the price, and I want to handle this one honestly because it’s where the oversell argument usually overreaches.

The headline numbers are genuinely alarming. Total student debt in England has passed £294 billion. The average English graduate now leaves owing around £47,700 once you fold in maintenance borrowing. And the government’s own forecasts suggest only about 56% of recent full-time starters will ever repay in full.

Here’s the honest caveat that a lot of angry columns leave out: these are not credit-card balances. Student loans in England are income-contingent — you repay a slice of earnings above a threshold, and whatever’s left is written off after forty years. It behaves far more like a graduate tax than a debt in the ordinary sense, and a large share of the cost is ultimately carried by government, not the graduate. If I’m going to be trusted when I say something’s broken, I have to say that too.

But — and it’s a real but — the nominal number and the lived burden are not the same thing, and an honest argument has to hold both. The psychological weight of a five-figure balance following you around in your twenties is real. The maintenance shortfall is real and immediate: HEPI reckons a student needs roughly £61,000 across a three-year degree just to hit a minimum socially acceptable standard of living, and that’s before tuition. Fees are now climbing again — £9,790 for 2026/27, indexed to inflation so they rise more or less automatically from here.

So the defensible claim isn’t “everyone is crushed by debt.” It’s: we sold a degree as an investment, and for a student on a weak course with thin job prospects, it’s a bad investment they were talked into, framed as the only sensible option. You don’t need the debt to be ruinous for that to be true. You just need it to buy less than it was supposed to.

The output

And it does buy less, because the second half of the old bargain has quietly broken.

The deal I heard myself as a young man was simple: work hard, get the qualification, the good job follows. For many graduates right now, that second clause has stopped being reliable. Graduate job vacancies fell 14.6% in 2024 — the sharpest drop since the 2008 crash — and advertised roles fell further through 2025. The Institute of Student Employers reported an average of 140 applications per graduate vacancy. Underneath the headline unemployment sits the quieter poison: underemployment. Graduates pulling shifts in hospitality are counted as “employed” while their careers never start — and US longitudinal work suggests that starting out underemployed makes you far more likely to remain underemployed years later. The first rung doesn’t just wobble; the rest of the ladder can vanish behind it.

Then lay AI on top. Generative AI is beginning to automate precisely the entry-level, process-heavy tasks that graduate jobs used to be built from — the very rung the government is now trying to rebuild. I won’t pin the whole collapse on AI; post-pandemic over-hiring, economic nerves and plain corporate retrenchment are all in the mix, and it’s too early to be certain. But the direction is not subtle, and the bottom of the ladder is being reshaped at speed.

The counterweight I refuse to skip

Here is where I stop prosecuting, because I don’t respect an argument that only prosecutes.

University is not a con. Graduate unemployment, at around 5.5%, is still lower than non-graduate unemployment at around 8.1%. Over a full career, the graduate premium is real for a great many people. For medicine, law, engineering, academia and a long list of others, a degree is not oversold — it’s non-negotiable, and I’d be a fool to suggest otherwise.

So what has collapsed isn’t the value of a degree. It’s the value of the presumption — the automatic, unexamined assumption that a degree, any degree, is the right move for every young person regardless of the subject, the institution, the teaching or the market they’ll graduate into. Averages hide enormous variation. The graduate premium is a national average draped over wildly different individual outcomes, and if you’re the student on a course with weak teaching, poor completion and thin progression, paying the better part of ten grand a year to be lectured at in a hall and then dropped into a market of 140-applicants-per-role, that average is cold comfort. The marginal case is where the oversell does its damage — and we filled that margin on purpose by telling a whole cohort the alternative was for people who couldn’t cut it.

Who it actually fails

I have a personal stake in this, and I’ll declare it.

I never did a traditional undergraduate degree. My education was characterised as “he’s very bright, but a bit lazy”. Some of my better teachers actually “got me” and I still remember them to this day. Shout-out to Mrs Bayliss, Mrs Isherwood, and one or two others. But I wasn’t lazy; I was bored. I, like a sizeable minority of people, don’t learn by being made to sit still while someone blah, blah, blahs at me. You know, like the teacher in Peanuts? I was sat there thinking about taking the TV apart to work out what all the bits did or whether it was possible to make a scrolling game on a Sinclair ZX80. Don’t worry the TV was an old discarded one, not our main telly. And, yes, you could make a scrolling game on a ZX80.

I ‘failed’ my A-levels and came nowhere near the grades I needed for university. I scraped into what was then Portsmouth Polytechnic on a Maths degree. Then I ‘failed’ the first year of that. So I switched to an HND at Portsmouth, walked into a job as a junior software engineer, and over forty years went from writing code to running the company. I did the MBA decades later, when I chose to. The route that built my entire career is precisely the kind of respected, applied, teaching-focused route we spent the 1990s dismantling and the last thirty years quietly sneering at. I am, in a small way, evidence that the “only respectable path” was never the only path that worked.

And some of the minds this system serves worst are the ones I’d back hardest. The traits our education machine is least built to accommodate — needing structure, thinking in patterns, deep focus on one thing, discomfort with ambiguous social performance — are ones I’ve built a career on, and I’m not the only one. I won’t romanticise neurodivergence into a secret founder gene; that’s lazy. The point is narrower and harder to argue with: 40% of the students who escalated a formal complaint to the higher-education adjudicator last year reported being disabled. That figure isn’t a footnote. It’s the system telling on itself. We built it for one kind of mind and then act surprised at what falls out of the bottom.

The trap on the other side

Another piece of honesty, because the fix has its own con built in if we’re not careful.

The alternative is not automatically better, and it is not automatically fairer. Look at the degree apprenticeship — genuinely a better product for the person who can land one: earn while you learn, a full degree, no debt, an employer who co-designed it and is standing there ready to hire. But the Education Policy Institute found that just 10.7% of young degree apprentices come from disadvantaged backgrounds, compared with 19.4% of undergraduates overall. The “better deal” is currently reaching the already-advantaged first. Swap one narrow ladder for another, and we’ve solved precisely nothing.

And pushing everyone up doesn’t work either — it just relocates the problem. South Korea leads the world with 70.6% of young adults holding a degree, and the result isn’t a nation of fulfilled graduates; it’s a graduate glut, with around 45% of the country’s NEETs holding a tertiary qualification. High attainment is not the same as good outcomes. Maximise bums on university seats, and you manufacture the frustrated, over-credentialed, underemployed generation we’re now staring at here.

Where I land

University was oversold. Not fake — oversold. Sold to people it didn’t suit, at a price that outran what it delivered, as the only respectable option in a country that deliberately starved the alternatives. The con, as I’ve said before, was never the university. It was the “only option.”

The corrective isn’t to burn it down or to talk a new generation out of a path that still transforms plenty of lives. It’s to tell young people the truth: that a degree is one good option among several, brilliant for some and a poor bet for others, and that choosing the applied route should be a first choice, not a failure. That means real alternatives, properly funded, with genuine parity of access and not just esteem — so the door that opens isn’t only the one your postcode was always going to open anyway.

Because the rot underneath all of this is the same rot I see everywhere in education: we built the system around the convenience of institutions rather than the learner’s experience. Fix that, and the hard hat and the graduation cap can finally mean what they were always supposed to — not a hierarchy, just two honest ways up.

Full disclosure

If you’ve made it this far, then you obviously care about this issue. Good to have you here. So at this point, I should explain that I have skin in this game, and you should read everything above with that in mind.

I’m the CTO of Desk2Educate Ltd — and Desk2Educate is one of the alternative paths I’ve just spent two thousand words arguing for. So let me be precise about how narrow a slice of the problem we actually touch, because the quickest way to discredit an argument like this is to end it with a sales pitch dressed as a conclusion.

We’re not rebuilding the applied tier or reviving the polytechnics. That’s a job for governments and funding settlements, not a start-up, and I’d be embarrassed to pretend otherwise. We’re not trying to replace universities. What we do is smaller and more specific: opening up entrepreneurship education to founders who don’t usually get a fair shot at it — the ones without the network, the family capital or the right accent for the room. And we’re trying to build it the way I think most education should be built: less rigid course, more personalised and non-linear, something that adapts to the learner instead of asking the learner to contort themselves around an institution’s timetable. It is, more or less, the whole thesis of this piece turned into a product.

Which is exactly why you should be sceptical when I say it. I would, wouldn’t I? So take the argument on its evidence, not on my word — I’ve sourced every claim and flagged every caveat precisely so this last paragraph doesn’t have to do any persuading. Desk2Educate is one answer, for one group of people, and a modest one at that. The case for needing far more paths than the single oversold one doesn’t rest on it. It rests on the numbers — and the numbers were true before I ever had a stake in the outcome.