To think people are overeducated in the UK?

There’s no law that says you have to work with your chosen degree. I worked in my field for years before I realised I was miserable and started my own business that you need very little qualifications for.

Anti-intellectualism is so dangerous. Children read less and less, as do adults.

i’m starting my PhD this year (I’ve done my A-Levels, Bachelors, and Masters consecutively, so I’ll possibly have my PhD by the time I’m in my mid 20s). I’m not doing it for the job prospects - either I’ll earn more as a result (and pay more of my student finance off) or I won’t, and my student finance payments won’t change (they stack, so I essentially pay the same whether I just have the masters or the masters and PhD).

I'm doing my PhD because I really want one. I want to contribute, I want to research, and I want to have the accomplishment.

“degrees are worthless”. No, they’re just becoming standard - lots employers expect you to have one (or an equivalent).

Its too easy for employers and institutions to hire people from abroad and sponsor them. They want to do this because the type of person who migrates to a global capital like London tends to be the most motivated, talented and ambitious of their home population. Some of that motivation can stem from having known abject poverty and perceiving a uk middle class lifestyle as relatively more wealthy/comfortable than a local brit sees it as. People also tend to work very hard when they know their visa depends on their job. Its a known issue and causes brain drain from poorer countries.

We need highly skilled people and we do create jobs for them, unfortunately skilled migrants then out compete brits for them. Look at the NHS, where a lot of training posts are going to overseas applicants who've already qualified elsewhere.

The government tends not to want to limit this migration because a) it keeps wages down and b) the productivity of these highly skilled, motivated young migrants tends to enrich those at the top and drive economic growth.

I don't think we are overeducated. I think we are educated in the wrong things. We have a lot of skills shortages in the UK, e.g., network engineering/architecture, cloud engineering, cyber security, etc.

The landscape for employment is changing faster than our education and employment infrastructure can keep up with. We should be limiting the number of people training/studying for oversaturated sectors and encouraging more people into the sectors we are underskilled in.

Definitely not. There are far too many nowhere near educated enough as they didn't or couldn't, for whatever reason, engage in education at a secondary school level.

Some people are pushed to get a degree just because it is the done thing for intelligent people, without the degree actually leading to any specific employment. Some of these people are now in jobs that they would have had without the degree and a now getting less in their pocket each month than their colleagues on the same wage as they are paying through the nose for degrees they didn't need. But that's not your issue here.

Your example shows there are just not enough higher level jobs available now, and I fear this situation is going to get worse.

This woman was more likely hired for her experience in higher management level roles rather than for her phd/masters. Your DS at 18 will have not gained a high enough understanding and experience to be suitable for this role, even if he started at 16 there, that is 2 years max experience working in the store. Just because it is a supermarket, doesn't make it any less of an important role, it needs to be run professionally by someone with the correct skill set

I don't know if this is still the case, but Lidl used to pay their staff considerably more than other supermarkets. They also tend to retain their staff for long periods. They are unlikely to hire a teenager looking for a summer job.

The job market is tough at the moment. My work recently advertised a part-time job paying c. £24K pa pro rata, and we had multiple applicants with post graduate degrees including a Phd. It's a nice place to work despite the pay, but you don't need that level of education to work here.

There are still some jobs that have quite a high turnover - Tesco delivery pickers are always recruiting locally. But they will still prefer to employ someone with a track record of employment and who potentially will stay for longer.

… maybe on paper.

I agree - we are complacent. Which is fine when you're only competing against your own countrymen, but when the game board is global...we lose.

It is far from everyone going to university though, 35% of people go on to further education.

I am more concerned by the sheer amount of young people who can't read, write or talk properly, across many town in the UK. Many of these are ex industrial/mill towns, where thousands of people never travel beyond their local supermarket.

I would say we are suffering a definite lack of cultural education, including how to cook or identify 'food', whilst the tabloid press is urging it's less educated readership to push sentiments of anti-intellectualism even further.

So no, I don't feel that the UK is overeducated, lol.
It is also incredibly immobile and unproductive. Get out of the cities and financial centres and take a look at the growing illiteracy levels in all areas of the UK (and there was me thinking you all lived in thatched rural enclaves with 10 local butchers ..)

It could be a reflection of those particular people and the job market in academia. There is a big difference between Phds and Masters degrees. You can do a Masters degree in a year and many are taught courses. It's just like another year of university. A PhD is years of independent research, study and writing.

People who do PhDs often want to go into academia but there are few jobs and the pay is so poor its becoming a preserve of the wealthy or those with a second income or partner who can support them.

So you get these middle class kids of lawyers and bankers who fund them to do their Ivory Tower phd in pointless subjects like the social implications of the architecture of a long demolished prison. They get their PhD and think they are going to be the next Professor Yaffle-Plum of Oxford University - but they can't get a job, mummy and daddy assumed they would get a job so stop funding them and reality bites so they go off to train to be a solicitor or a shop steward or something boring and conventional that actually pays an income - having wasted a lot of time and othere people's money doing a PhD that is valueless both to themselves and the wider pool of human knowledge.

I think the reverse. Too many people in the UK are under educated

Have you heard the way people speak nowadays? They are most not over-educated, lol.

Christ. Where's the source for this @ThiagoJones ?

OP, it's a tight jobs market so the right skills, for any role, are important.

Good customer service skills, well turned out, polite, friendly, able to diffuse tense situations. The employer will always go for the best person they can find for the money.

My ds17 has a part time job, he trained as a pool lifeguard at 16 because he knew the local pools and health clubs struggle to find qualified staff. He was employed over the other applicant because he was younger and therefor.£2.45 an hour less expensive.

It's tough out there. Every tiny advantage matters.

We made a very silly mistake telling everyone they need to go to university.

Almost all jobs do not require a degree. It's a total con.

If the OP really wants her 18 year old to be a success in life and to have guaranteed employment then she needs to be encouraging him to study for a trade eg plumbing, electrical work, carpentry. A good trades person will always find work and a smart one will make a fortune.

There needs to be a balance of unskilled / skilled / academically qualified people in order for everything to work.

But educated in what?

Having a degree in Renewable Energy Engineering or AI will probably give rise to more opportunities than choosing a degree in Performing Arts where jobs are rare and there is over supply of graduates.

Choosing the right skills is key.

As a recruiter I agree the job market's difficult in some sectors, but honestly think this is just as much about people going to Uni without any clear aims around what they want to do with the qualifications

Again and again we see "they want the Uni experience", but it's a pretty expensive way to go about avoiding paid work for a few more years, the more so when you add in gap years and so on

The push for young people to go to university was simply a policy by the 90s Labour government to get them off the unemployment stats and benefits.
After the nightmare of the 1980s and the failure of the Tory Youth Opportunity Schemes (remember them?!) together with major industrial decline, we had millions unemployed and nowhere for the young to go (sounds very similar to today).

The universities were able to charge fees, so lots of enticing new courses were laid on, the so-called ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’ and all that happened was that the 16-18 year old unemployed became the 21-23 year old unemployed.

Add in the continued industrial decline and the lack of investment for emerging sectors and we’re back where we were in the late ‘80s, only everyone is older.

I don't think that is true. I am educated ro Masters level and I was more left wing at school, and certainly before spending 20 years in the workplace. I'd describe my self as slightly right of centre now.

It wasn't their Masters and PhDs that got those people their jobs at Lidl though.

The more educated a person, the more left wing they tend to be.

I worked with my local university on Brexit. This was a vote of education levels. Ditto Reform. Most Reform voters support Brexit.

STEM degrees cost more to provide to British students than Home tuition fees provide. Were it not for Overseas tuition fees, STEM degree courses would run at a loss. In Schools without sufficient numbers of Overseas students, they do.

Sadly we are not as highly paid as you might think. To land a lectureship in the research intensive universities, the entry rung on the ladder of permanent academic staff, competition is extremely fierce. A PhD and at least one postdoc are required - that’s at least six years of very hard graft on a student stipend and then an okay one. Nowadays many do two postdocs. New lecturers tend to be about 30 yo minimum.

All that slogging and they typically start on salaries in the low to mid £40K’s (unless they come with even greater experience). For a 50-60 hour work week.