To think people are overeducated in the UK?

[Watdidusay]

I am raging about this too be honest and I'm not sure why.

One of the mums at the school apparently lost her corporate job 8 months ago. Found this out today when I ran into her in Lidl in the next town - she was working as a manager there.
We ended up talking later in the day and turns out four of the staff there have masters degrees or above (one has a PhD). Apparently this is a common thing people are doing now as they cant get jobs in their fields
AIBU to think we are completely over educating people in this country now?

Feeling angry I think as DS (18) tried so hard over the summer to get a job like this but am finding out now they are all being taken up by people with lots of degrees!

I think spending 3 years in a diverse university campus can be quite radicalising for some! Young men in particular

I got rejected for Lidl’s trainee manager programme last week! I’m a teacher so I have a degree, but I want to change career. I don’t think you can blame educated people for your 18 year old not getting a summer job. It’s not like Lidl is especially busy in summer. Maybe he should try nearby holiday resorts?

I think it is certainly an issue where people haven’t been educated to a point where they can see an issue with the problems many people are pointing out with the leftist agenda

Exactly.

Being a store manager is quite a 'big' job. It's not just 'working in Lidl', which often means stacking shelves, working on till if lucky.

Good for the mum who managed to bag a job like that, probably fairly local.

I do not get why you are 'raging'. Your daughter wasn't looking for a management job.

She has since clarified but it wasn’t obvious. She also said it was her DS, not DD, if we’re criticising reading comprehension.

"...sheer [number] of young people who can't read, write or talk properly.."

The popularity of a party that wants to strip workers rights, charge for health services, destroy consumer protection and says the working class "have never had it so good" would suggest your analysis was / is wrong. Nope definitely NOT over educated

The push to send so many to university means that graduates are in all areas of work and have been for decades, strange you only just noticed

And if graduates who can’t find work in their field don’t take jobs in shops etc they are accused of being scroungers and thinking they are too posh to work.

Would you prefer that highly intelligent people starve instead?

Yeah, I mean I’d happily give up the job I’m hugely over qualified for so that an 18 year old can have it instead, but I’ve got to feed my family somehow!

I’m an academic and intrigued by your point about Chinese applicants taking the jobs. Which jobs are you referring to? Perhaps you’re in STEM and it’s different. I’m a humanities lecturer and there are no jobs, for Chinese people or British.

Intriguing that you preferred retail too! I worked in those shit jobs as a student and hated it. So many customers are demeaning.

I do not understand why you need a PhD in mathematics to work in Lidl

Of course you don't. But why should the fact that you happen to have a PhD in maths mean that you can't work in Lidl? In the case of the school mum you mention, I imagine there are plenty of skills from her corporate job that will be useful in her new role - certainly more than a new graduatd would havr.

Not sure of your choice of words but yes thanks to Blair and his stupid fucking policy of "everyone has to go to university because otherwise you're a useless worthless thicko piece of shit" there are lots of people with unnecessary degrees and debt and no one that can actually physically do anything useful. Like build things.

I think so too. When she eventually leaves, no doubt Lidl will be sorry to lose her (all things being equal of course, that she's a decent person to work with, etc).

Having a degree doesnt preclude you from doing other jobs, theyre as entitled to the jobs as everyone else your DS isnt more deserving

Nail on the head. He may not have meant it, but that's the message he gave.

Education is valuable in and of itself. I know that some people go to university hoping to find a good job when they graduate, but the sad truth is that these days there are not so many graduate jobs around.

That is nothing new, sadly. Career opportunities come and go. For instance I spent most of my working life in It - I had no degree and computer jobs did not exist when I was doing my stuff with careers officers. My son, who also went into It needed his First in Computer Science to get his first job. The firms would not look at anyone with a lower result or a different subject. Several years later, he tells me that they are not even recruiting graduates with firsts. There are far fewer opportunities now, because AI is limiting the entry level jobs.

This is life these days. Being well qualified does not guarantee a well paid professional job these days. Education however, benefits society. Children of well educated people do far better than those without. We should keep encouraging our young people to pursue their interests into academia, if that's what they want. What happens afterwards is down to the vagaries of the job market. This is just one more thing that makes life difficult for today's young people. I would not like to be in their shoes these days.

Yep but what about the 65- 70% who didn’t go - it wasn’t compulsory - presumably lots of those chose not to go and build things ,

There's definitely a middle class jobs crisis that has got worse in the last year or two. I'm very aware of it, as we've had two waves of redundancies at my place. I work in software. The first time, three years ago now, everyone found another job fairly quickly. But in 2024, word was that it was much tougher, and in 2025 very hard indeed to get a job in tech or some related role. I go on LinkedIn a lot, and people there seem to be getting more and more desperate.

Sorry, I said in an earlier post, "Your daughter, and you have a son. I must have glossed over that detail initially.

Your choice of words, 'go mental', 'raging', 'angry' - well over the top.

I do agree on this as per my earlier post - my H does work for a large glamorous media company, they cannot keep their young grads it seems for more than about 8 months, because whilst the company is a glam one to have on your CV the roles they give them are mind numbingly boring and not needing anything other than a couple of GCSEs to be honest and the atmosphere is crap because half the staff WFH half the week and it’s all very sterile . - not at all what younger people think it will be.

They are subsidised by the public

Good for her for meeting her family’s needs.
Maybe it was the best choice for her at the time. Maybe she enjoys it. Maybe she longs to be back in the corporate world doing what she is qualified for and (hopefully) enjoyed after investing her time and money into. Maybe she doesn’t and this fits around her family and reduces her stress levels.
None of our business really.

Why exactly are you raging? You sound like a doofus to have come to that conclusion rather than: the job market is tough right now.

Well there's an early contender for 'Most unexpected thread title of 2026'! For every holder of a PhD working in Lidl there'll be 10 utter morons saying somebody else 'could of' done that job. Overeducation definitely isn't a widespread problem in the UK, no.