No Time for Celebrating

With the final exam now complete and little more than a graduation ceremony to separate me between the acceptability of being both a student and having a job and becoming another statistic who can't find a job in a market so heavily inundated with graduates that it comes as something of a surprise that people aren't selling themselves on Gumtree and Craigslist as veritable prostitutes of education. As you can readily imagine, I don't feel like celebrating. A lot of people are posting statuses, celebrating their freedom and recognising that their university career, at the very least, is coming to an end and, for some, to fruition. I fear the celebrations will be short-lived. The knowledge that you are little more than another addition to a market that is impossibly difficult to succeed in - graduate jobs - should soon be a somber thought in the minds of all those who haven't secured jobs yet.

That's my situation - twenty one year old male with £24,000 of student debt seeks full-time job in anything above what can be described as diminutive and meaningless work. It sounds like a job advertisement but that's what job seeking for a graduate is like. You attempt to balance the effort between "selling yourself" as a candidate stronger than others but, at the same time, attempting to under-sell yourself in order to not make yourself look like your head is more inflated than a helium balloon without the comic vocal effects. There seems to be one option left to students who haven't managed to find a job - go into post-graduate education. It's another layer of complication, debt and needless qualifications that create a generation of students who have more education than they do experience of the real world.

All too often, you hear employers complain that students come out of university with no "real world" skills or marketable skills, the kind of things that make people want to hire you. There's never anybody in the interview who retorts "If you gave some of them jobs, maybe they'd acquire those skills". You see, employers simply assume that you have gone out of your way in your three years to pursue every reasonable avenue to get work and that, if you haven't done that, you must be an atypical student who gets drunk, celebrates into the sun rises the next morning and then scrapes through exams as if they were nothing - all to the tune of a lovely hangover.

There are quite a few people to blame in this situation but, primarily, it's the Labour government of ten years that pursued the idea that fifty percent of people should be going to university. Did nobody think to point out at the time that having more and more people graduating with degrees would saturate the market and create a situation where everyone has a degree and it's nothing special? That's why I went to university. I wanted to differentiate myself from other people in the job market by having a specialist knowledge of the subject I wanted to teach, study, etc. Now, everyone has a degree and it makes it worthless to all but the student who is loaded with debt that accumulates more and more interest.

There's an amusing pun that I recall from the Big Bang Theory in which the Chairman of the Department enters a room full of Howard, Raj, Leonard and Sheldon. The Chairman addresses each of these in turn as "Doctor [...]" until he gets to Howard when he states "Mister Wolowitz", a reference to his lack of a doctorate. Howard retorts "I have a Masters degree" and the Chairman responds quizzically with the apt statement "Who doesn't?". That's the job market of today. You put your undergraduate degree on your CV, terribly proud of what you've achieved and then you discover it's about as much use as you telling them that, when you were six, you built a bridge out of lolly sticks.

It's not all negative today. Nick Boles MP's personal assistant contacted me today and invited me to a week's work experience in September with Mr Boles at the House of Commons which should be an excellent venture into politics, a career I have long thought I've had the skills for - cynical, provocative, outspoken and altogether wrong on most issues. It's just a shame that my progress in this venture is delayed by individuals who don't seem to be doing all that much to help people get into the matter. It goes back to that old argument - politics is for the rich and the educated. Perhaps, for some, that's how they want to keep it but at least Nick is trying to do something about it.