By Ellis Newton
To many, Britain appears to be experiencing an educational success story. More young people than ever are achieving high grades, more are progressing into higher education and university participation continues to reach record levels. Yet beneath these apparently impressive statistics sits an uncomfortable reality: young people are entering a labour market that is increasingly unable to reward the educational success they were told to pursue.
The problem begins much earlier than university. Rising GCSE grades are routinely celebrated as evidence of improving standards, but the picture is more complicated. Recent analysis has highlighted the extraordinary growth in top grades over recent decades, while the latest National Reference Test shows that underlying attainment in English has not improved since 2017, with some evidence of decline at grade 4. The point is not that today’s young people are incapable or that every higher grade is undeserved. Rather, it is that qualifications are becoming an increasingly imperfect measure of the knowledge and skills employers consider.
At A-level, the same phenomenon is even more striking. Around 28% of grades are now A or A*, compared with roughly 10% historically. With exceptional grades becoming increasingly common, our ability to distinguish exceptional performance inevitably weakens.
This matters because these grades are not produced in isolation. They feed a system which has spent decades encouraging young people towards one supposedly golden route: school, university, graduate job.
Higher education remains essential, and there are professions for which a degree is indispensable. The problem however is that university has become the default, almost socially enforced route to ‘success’. When everyone is encouraged to obtain a degree, what is it supposed to distinguish? At a time where higher education was reserved for a much smaller proportion of the population, a degree was a genuine differentiator in the labour market. Today, with university participation at historically high levels, a graduate is increasingly a small fish in a very large pond. The qualification that was once a signal of distinction risks becoming simply the minimum entry requirement for jobs that previously never demanded one.
I recently came across the University Industrial Complex, a paper examining the problems facing higher education in Wales. It was an interesting read, particularly its distinction between “the pursuit of knowledge and university study”. Its warning that “mass participation should not be mistaken for mass education” is particularly pertinent to the question of whether simply increasing the number of people attending university necessarily represents educational progress.
A degree is simply another qualification now. It is not automatically a reflection of meaningful knowledge anymore, just as a high GCSE grade is not automatically evidence that a young person possesses the skills demanded by the modern economy.
Yet we continue to expand our pursuit of Higher Education while neglecting the alternatives. Apprenticeships, technical education and vocational training have too often been culturally treated as second-best routes. The message to ambitious young people has been clear: university is progression; vocational education is an alternative.
The labour market is now exposing the weakness of that assumption.
Graduate vacancies have recently fallen to their lowest level in a decade, even as UCAS reports record numbers of UK 18-year-olds securing university and college places. We are therefore producing more people with degrees at precisely the moment when the economy is becoming less capable of providing the graduate jobs they were encouraged to expect.
At the other end of the system, young people are increasingly struggling to make the transition from education into work at all. Britain has just below a million young people outside employment, education or training. Wales provides a particularly stark case study: 17% of 16–24-year-olds were NEET in the year ending December 2025, an increase of 5.5 percentage points in a single year.
This should force us to question what we mean by educational success. If a young person achieves strong grades, progresses through university, accumulates debt and then enters a labour market offering fewer opportunities, have we really succeeded?
The problem is compounded by the fact that employers continue to report shortages of practical and technical skills. The UK Government has itself acknowledged that employers were able to rely on overseas recruitment rather than investing sufficiently in domestic training, describing this as employers having “swapped skills investment for cheap overseas labour.”
That creates an extraordinary contradiction. We have record numbers of young people achieving academic qualifications while simultaneously struggling to supply the skills our economy needs.
The danger is that young people are being left to pay the price for a promised future that no longer exists.
They were told to get the grades. They got them. They were told to go to university. They did. They were told that qualifications would provide opportunity. Yet the labour market increasingly offers insecurity, incomprehensible competition and underemployment.
The answer is not to attack university, lower educational ambition or tell young people that academic achievement does not matter. It is to broaden our definition of success.
Britain needs universities capable of producing genuine scholarship and highly skilled professionals. But it also needs respected apprenticeships, technical colleges, vocational education and employers willing to train the next generation. Young people should be able to choose between these routes according to their talents and ambitions, rather than being funnelled towards one path because it was decided that it is the most prestigious.
Education should prepare people for life, not simply produce increasingly impressive statistics. Our education system may appear increasingly successful on paper, while it continues to leave too many young people unprepared for the reality waiting beyond it.
That is not educational success. It is a warning that if the trajectory is not changed, things may only get worse.
Final Thoughts:
This is an incredibly complex and multifaceted issue, and a full examination would need to go much further, looking at tertiary education, NEETs, migration and the role of foreign labour, among many other factors. This article only scratches the surface.
What I am most interested in, however, is hearing from others. My own experience has certainly shaped my view: as a FE teaching graduate, I struggled to find work after
university. My partner, a newly qualified nurse, continues to face similar difficulties, while friends who studied subjects ranging from cybersecurity to criminology have ended up working in jobs completely unrelated to their fields. For some, the year or so following graduation has been among the most difficult periods of their lives, stuck at home, struggling to find work and questioning whether the years they spent studying were worth it.
Perhaps most concerning is that these experiences are becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss as isolated cases. Politicians may finally be waking up to the problem, but they need to move faster. If the underlying issues are left unaddressed, there is little reason to believe that the number of young people disconnected from education and employment will do anything but grow.
Further Reading:
Some of the pieces that informed and inspired this article include:
● Today’s GCSE results aren’t good news – they’re evidence of a system failing young people
● “A generational challenge” – young people and the labour market
● The University Industrial Complex: New Report Calls for Radical Overhaul of Welsh Higher Education
● Young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) - Office for National Statistics
● Cost management prioritised over growth as employer confidence remains subdued | CIPD
● Employer Skills Survey 2024: Full UK research report
Who Wrote this?..
