I spent a good part of a morning last week in the FT, talking with journalists about pensions but also about the predicament the children of parents have, once they’ve graduated.
It doesn’t surprise me that the paper bemoans the financial plight of British grads today. Not only do they get less of a pay premium for a good degree but they have loans to repay if they find half way lucrative work. There is an incentive to fail and little incentive to succeed.
The atmosphere of Bracken House by St Pauls is far from that of the offices and bars and sandwich and coffee shops around it. It is a place of erudition where people discuss the kind of problems that middle class graduates have as they try to create and bring up families while seeing the value of intellectual investment being down valued. I mean that there is precious little of the intellectual brilliance that I see coming from the FT being reflected in conversations beyond its four walls!
Ironically, the only way that recent graduates can be measured objectively is by their salary premium, how much they earn more for giving up a minimum of work to get a degree
We have more graduates as a share of the workforce than any other country analysed but it pays our graduates less (and that’s before counting in the student loan and the loss of earnings that occurred when young people at college earn little more than pin money.
John Burn-Murdoch’s argument in this morning’s paper asks the question of this blog,
“is university still worth it?”
He concludes this is the wrong question and points to a lack of productivity in Britain as the start middle and ending of the graduate’s woes.
Like so many of contemporary Britain’s problems, the graduate squeeze is downstream of broader economic woes. Efforts to alleviate it would do better to focus on restoring growth than making tweaks to higher education intake and financing.
If Britain can haul its productivity growth and skilled job creation back into line with its peers, graduate earnings will be stronger, enabling student loan terms to be more generous and allowing more young people to pursue their passions confident of landing a good job.
I am not so sure. There is an intellectual curiosity in science and in arts that has led to Britain being the hotbed of the scientific revolution (along with California the London , Cambridge Oxford triangle is driving the West’s progression). Britain is the world leader in music, drama and our culture in general is admired – could any country in the world put on the proms or host Glastonbury or offer Shakespeare and other drama on the South Bank and in Stratford?
My concern is that we have down valued the intellectual brilliance of science and arts in this country to the point where we recognise nothing that cannot be put on a chart and measured in accountancy terms. We cannot just work harder to get richer, we must be smarter and learn to make our superiority in Science and the Arts (these intellectual hotspots) what Britain is about and rewarded for.
This is what I thought as I walked out of the FT last week and it’s a thought that’s still whizzing around my ageing brain. We simply do not value graduates for what they are. John Keats wrote a lifetime’s work in the year that he was 23. Some reckon he died broken by criticism not TB.
