They said get the degree. Get the diploma, get the job, get the life. So a generation did. They took the debt. They got the paper.
Now look at the math. Eight thousand three hundred and eighty-three graduate jobs posted in all of July in the whole United Kingdom. Two hundred sixty-two thousand eight hundred twenty students walking onto campus in September. That’s roughly one job for every thirty-one kids who paid tuition to chase it. And the count is forty-five percent lower than last year — the lowest since Adzuna started keeping the books in 2016.
In 2017 there were more than fifty-five thousand graduate positions posted. Today there are eight thousand. The promise got smaller while the tuition got bigger.
And the wall didn’t move by accident. Companies swapped entry-level humans for AI because it’s cheaper than training them. Rachel Reeves — the former Labour chancellor — hiked National Insurance and the minimum wage on employers, and Adzuna’s co-founder will tell you straight: that made hiring worse, not better. Universities still charged the same tuition. Politicians still cut ribbons. The credential still costs the same. About a million young people in the UK are not in education, employment, or training. Sixteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds tell pollsters they’ve lost faith in their futures.
They call the credential an investment in your future. Bullshit. It’s an invoice delivered before the door shut.
I did everything they told my generation to do. My grandfather had a union job and the door was already open. The grandkids are walking into eight thousand openings and a chatbot in the chair.
Eat shit. The system worked exactly like it was built to work — for everyone except the kid who paid for the ticket. Fuck that promise.
Source story: Adzuna counts 8,383 UK graduate vacancies in July.