to think young people are being terribly treated at the moment

[seades]

My brother graduated from a RG uni in the summer and has found getting a graduate job very difficult. At the moment he is interning for free at a PR firm (which is what he wants to do) in the day and working in a bar in the evening and weekends (whenever he can get shifts). Most weeks he is working 60-70 hours a week and in return he can barely afford to eat and pay the rent in his house which is an absolute dump. I was talking to a friend today and she said that this sort of thing is common place and that it teaches young people the value of hard work. AIBU to think that she is talking rubbish, this sort of demands on young people are unacceptable. and that young people are getting a terribly raw deal at the moment

Rather than young people being badly treated (by whom?), isn't their current situation just a consequence of where we are in the economic cycle? Graduates found it hard to get jobs in the early 1980s and the early 1990s too. I don't think it helps to suggest that somebody (the government/the previous generation/the universities) is deliberately treating young people badly. Interest rates in the early 1990s went above 15%. That wasn't fun either.

Their problems are exacerbated by the fact that degrees are ten a penny now. Most people who went to university in the past ten years have been sold a pup, and I feel sorry for anybody in that position, but people make their own choices. I'd advise anybody considering further education to do a cash flow analysis and a business case; three years' lost earnings plus £27k fees plus another £20k in living costs over three years means that you have to be confident that your qualification will increase your earnings.

Where I work our interns are not paid brilliantly, but they do get paid.

Financeprincess I agree with a lot of what you say but think you have to take the £27k fees quote out of your argument. Many young people are put off going to Uni now because of the tuition fees which they should not pay upfront and should see as more of a graduate tax, not a debt, upon employment. I don't resent paying back £20k worth of maintenance/tuition loans as a result of my recent higher education.

Of course, if they would get onto a better career path by going down the vocational rather than academic route, then by all means they can be put off by tuition fee costs. I just think it's a shame that young adults are using it as an argument to avoid Uni when some of them would flourish there. However arguably, these brightest brains may well do better contributing to the economy as entrepreneurs at 18, so perhaps my entire post is a moot point!

yanbu op

its shit and i worry about my dcs as they grow up :(

This there is no jobs for young people annoy me!! I after 5 years at university (RG then masters in a very specialised course at a international UNI), in 2009 when my phd went up in smoke and got hit by the banking crisis. My 0 hour contract job allowed me to up my hours!
17 months later I had done another masters and had the job I wanted in the area I wanted but it was temporary.
To get my dream job I changed a few times moved 400miles.
All my UNI friends who refused to take temporary jobs or wanted a certain job in a certain area still don't have the job they want. When those of us who where happy to move or take temp jobs have what we want (including the house and car ect).
Also 0 hours contracts are needed in a lot of industries!! Our ski industry would die with out it!

I think that the way young people are being badly treated today is that many are receiving very little advice yet are being expected to make choices which can have huge implications.

And which group comes off worse? The lower socio-economic groups of course. Those families which are new to higher education.

Without advice this group may be not just drawn but actually pushed by family to vocational courses. It looks sensible, go for a course which seemingly has a professional career at the end of it.

It is easy to blame students for choosing the wrong courses but just how good is anyone's judgement at 18? We all need some advice.

Hmm I'm not sure. It's all very well having a great degree, and I'm not knocking the value of them. However, when recruiting for a job recently my main focus was definitely experience; the degree an applicant had was secondary. I needed somebody who I could rely on to run projects and events and look after up to 150 people at once: no piece of paper is going to guarantee that.

I graduated in the not-too-distant past (am under 30) and I found it relatively easy to get a job, because by the time I left uni I had a reasonable amount of experience in the workplace, starting with my weekend job when I was 16. It wasn't the best-paid job in the world - far, far less than Christmas's DSD's wage upthread - but it led onto other things in a reasonable amount of time.

Friends from the same course as me, with the same or higher degree result, found it much harder to find a full time job. Those of us who had work experience found work pretty much straight away; the others took a lot longer. I know it's hard at the moment but has there ever been a time when graduates can walk into their dream job, or even guarantee to be in their chosen sector, straight from uni?

And I agree with kayakgirl about having to move to where the work is - sometimes you just have to do it!

The stuff about too many degrees etc is a red herring and something that is bandied around by the Daily Mail etc. because it satisfies a certain view of young people and the economy.

In reality, it was the previous Major government that started formulating the 50% tertiary education target, and the Blair government target was never actually 50% at university, it was 50% "having had some experience of tertiary-level education" - to include diplomas, workplace learning, short training courses, foundation courses and higher-level NVQs, among other things. The reason why this was thought desirable by both the previous Tory govt and the following Labour one was that the UK compares very badly for percentage of youth cohort having had some tertiary education, against economies like the US, Canada, China, Scandinavia, Finland and many countries in the Far East, some of whom send up to 80% to tertiary education and had at the time (and still have) faster-growing economies than ours.

Jobs for those with lower than tertiary level skills have collapsed in the last 30 years, and employers are Jo longer willing to train school-leavers as they used to: they want job applicants to come pre-trained. Everyone knows a successful plumber and so on, but in reality, unskilled, trade and vocational job sectors have completely collapsed since the 1980s. Technological upskilling also means that most jobs now require a level of IT proficiency, literacy and numeracy that was rare 30 years ago.

The real problem is nothing to do with too many degrees, and everything to do with the fact that the current capitalist economy has come to rely on paying very little for labour and doing little to no training or investment in its workforce. This makes companies a lot of profit and since this us rewarded by the tax system and the low level of employment rights in the UK, there is no incentive to change it. Financeprincess you are too kind in thinking that these things are not deliberate - they are. I work in an area where for the last 15 years policymakers have been absolutely explicit about the fact that a low-wage, high debt economy where young people bear all the cost of their own training is exactly what they want.

Fees were raised for university not because university costs too much now that more people go (it doesn't: the HE budget was always very small, less than the government subsidies rail companies get), and we spend much less as a percentage of GDP on education than many competitor countries. Fees were put up to 27k because it is explicitly envisaged that the student loan books will eventually be sold to private companies who will then make money from skimming off interest charges as they collect the debt. That was the reason the current govt were so keen to raise the fee cap.

Internships make my blood boil.

I gained my degree quite a long time ago but I wouldn't choose to do it in today's economic climate. Jobs that required 'A' Levels when I left school now require a degree. It's nuts.

Yanbu!!

We're both 22 and in soul crushing jobs and this whole shebang reduces me to tears at least once a week.

Chubbykitty I sympathise, I'm 35 and in what ought to be a good job, but still massively priced out of housing and with a rubbish standard of living compared to those just a few years older who bought houses when they were at normal historical price levels. Can't see a time when we ever won't be struggling with high rents and no disposable income and it oughtn't to be like this. The generations above got a fair chance, but the under-35s today have been shafted. Housing and education debt will ruin the economy though, and it will end up rebounding on the older generations too, that's what is so sad.

This year I've already had two handouts from my dad to keep us in food. He doesn't mind. He has it to spare. But I shouldn't need daddy still paying my way, I should be able to look after myself and one other adult.

Our only light at the end of the tunnel is some inheritance I'm due which can go towards a deposit for a house of our own. Majority of montages must be cheaper than my private rented shed

Or mortgages.

Too many degrees is not a red herring. O levels were once seen as desirable and therefore more people sought to achieve them. When o levels became commonplace the candidates that wanted to stand head above their peers did a levels and the cycle repeated itself.

This is now the case with degrees. If everyone has a degree they replace the a level as the basic level of academic achievement. Then you get to a situation where there are so many graduates flooding the workplace that even the most basic of jobs can ask for one. Jobs that 20 years ago would have required 5 GCSEs and a bit of common sense.

ChristmasCareeristBitchNigel - what jobs that would have required 5 GCSEs and some common sense exist now? Genuinely curious here: what jobs are you thinking of? Are they exactly the same as 20 years ago? (BTW I entered the job market nearly 15 years ago and there weren't that many non-graduate jobs around then. Even so, in my first (graduate, professional, central London) job there were only two computers in the whole office and only one of them (in the senior partner's office) connected to the internet. Part of my job was to draft letters in longhand and send them in a leather folder to the secretaries who typed them up on word processors.

What jobs that an unskilled 16-year-old would have been hired to do 20 years ago exist now in the same form?

Do you think if Singapore or Finland are sending 80% of their young people to higher education and China and the US send 65% we are going to manage if we try to run our economy on 16-year-olds with 5 GCSEs? What are we going to make, invent, sell, export to compete with them?

YANBU it is quite clear that my DCs will struggle to replicate the standard of living they have been used to, whereas DH and I obtained a better standard than our parents (and they their parents before them) without any inheritances being involved.

Even in early 1980s when a much lower percentage of people went to University, a degree was still not a passport to success.
Most people got Graduate jobs they could have easily done without a degree but it was called a Graduate Traineeship and if you were lucky it got you a quicker managerial route.
Frightening how many Oxbridge students used to end up training as Accountants regardless of degree subject.

My three penniesworth...

Internships are OK in principle because they help people get past the chicken and egg thing that you can't get a job without experience and you can't get experience without a job. BUT...in practice lots of employers see them as a source of cheap, educated labour and get endless interns rather than offer anyone a full time job. Also they are more accessible to those with family connections and wealth who can afford to work for nothing.

House prices are inflated because of over the top lending in the past. The multiple of your salary you could borrow went up and up thanks to cheap mortgages.

I'm not well off at all, worry about bills etc, but I've got a house. Only because I'm in my 40s. I'm worse off than the 'baby boomers' who I really resent with their timeshares in the Canaries, their final salary pensions etc. Some friends of my parents bought their house 26 years ago for 54K and now it's worth 900k. That is ridiculous relative to the amount salaries have gone up.

The cost of living is so high, ridiculous prices for energy, greedy price hikes from the gas companies, clapped out old trains yet high commuting costs. Prices of consumer goods have gone down - clothes, electronics, etc. But they are peripheral compared with accommodation, fuel, Council Tax etc. It bugs the shit out of me that people berate the young for spending their money on and wanting these things, going out and getting drunk rather than 'saving for a deposit'. They can't afford houses, or to run them, that's a dream so they may as well enjoy themselves.

It's all shit, and the fact that someone upthread congratulated his/herself on only having one child because that is more affordable sums it up really. How ghastly is it when you can't even afford to procreate? Young people now feel they will never be able to afford the simple things - a house, a family - that older generations who did an honest day's work could expect, not unreasonably.

It's a very sad state of affairs and I worry like hell about the life/lifestyle available for my kids. The profession I work in offers much, much better opportunities in Canada, Australia. All for much more money, cheaper cost of living. I don't understand how we seem to get it all so wrong here.

No wonder people think they are better off on benefits, they often are.

I went a home visit with a GP in London recently. Really hard working woman in her early thirties. Visited a lovely council flat in an area where privately owned houses are only buyable by the seriously rich (like £3.4m for 3 bedrooms). All the tenants did was moan about how the council weren't dealing with maintenance issues quickly enough. She felt very resentful of this, she could only afford to buy a shoebox miles out, and if the roof leaked she has to pay for it. Out of taxed income.

All so wrong.

YANBU.
It's pretty tough for those in their twenties and even mid-30s at the minute. Myself and my friends from uni (we're 31) have all managed ok, most of us have got on to the housing ladder because we were able to find work after graduating.
I do worry though that there is a certain sense of 'entitlement' built in to graduates these days though that they should just be able to find their perfect jobs. It just doesn't work like that! I think the key for us was that we didn't worry what jobs we were going for necessarily, we just got a foot in the door somewhere and then moved up. One friend started with the council as low level admin, then applied after a few years for internal accountancy training, now she's qualified and doing very well. One lugged books around as a porter with the library for two years before moving up to enquiries, then eventually into management. I started on the counter as a cashier with a bank, now I manage a branch. None of us needed degrees for the jobs we applied for, but I genuinely believe that having degrees gave us a head start in these jobs. I remember having to have a talk with myself because I didn't feel like the job I was doing was 'worthy' considering my education - gave myself a mental slap and decided I'd just aim to be the best I possibly could at the job I was doing and stop obsessing about the fact I had a degree. Worked out ok.
TBH I feel a bit let down by my school - it was important to them that I got into uni, but I only ever got cursory careers advice and had no clue what the point of my degree was really!!

I blame the baby boomers

we (they I am not one) have set up a massively worse lot for the generation coming behind (even shortening life expectancies FFS) and it is a disgrace (not strong enough word)

all this talk of mobile phone contracts and needing to save makes my blood boil

I don't think we will ever get an answer though, the young need to get more political, we need to massively engineer house price drops and to sort out education will require decisions no one has the appetite for hence anyone that can planning a way round it.

I do worry though that there is a certain sense of 'entitlement' built in to graduates these days though that they should just be able to find their perfect jobs

Nessalina this is harsh. Graduates are working as cleaners. It's not about finding the dream job, it's about finding any job.

It's interesting you say that none of the jobs you did required a degree. In that case it's hardly worth wasting 27K on fees, is it? If you think your degree gave you an advantage it isn't because you are using it. The fact that you and your peers took 'non-graduate' level jobs and have done OK is hardly an argument for doing a degree. If you hadn't done one, you'd have been just as bright and just as able to do well in your job and get on. But without the debt, younger and with more time to get to where you want to be in life further down the road.

YANBU

Uptheairy Aint it funny that the 8 weeks "training" for JSA starts six weeks before Christmas and will take them beyond New Year.

Again we keep coming back to lack of good advice for young people. They go through school being told that everything and anything is possible. It is only when they start looking for work that reality sets in.

Perhaps most of the graduates working as cleaners don't have the necessary work experience/network contacts to move up and beyond basic jobs upon graduation?

I worked through uni in cleaning and as a part-time secretary. Upon graduating I could find work in a recruitment company as a result of my office skills. Now I'm doing well in marketing 4 years on as a result of my sales experience. It's been frustrating at times that I've not walked straight into a graduate marketing job straight after qualifying from an RG Uni with a 2:1 but realistically it is not very likely to happen. All these universities bandying about the "95% employment/further study within 6 months" stats are neglecting the fact that the majority are in jobs which are below an average salary upon graduation. It takes time and effort to work your way up and a degree is not a magical ticket to these positions. Employers are becoming far more aware of this.