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!

STEM academic here. The first paragraph I’ve quoted is spot on.

Both the HE system and the jobs market are full of problems, and these problems feed off each other. For example, when the jobs market is particularly weak many who can afford to do so will gamble on going for an MA/MSc in the hopes that the extra qualification plus an improved economy will give them better chances the following year.

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It isn’t why they don’t check it. They don’t check because they are not aware it exists and they’ve never heard anyone state that it’s important. There’s no career guidance which takes account of it on offer, and parents don’t know either.

I went to school with someone that left school at 16 and was mocked. He started work at ASDA and within 10 years he was the manager of a huge store. I know who made the right call. He'll probably out-earn most of his peers he went to school with, and without any debt. You don't or shouldn't need a degree to manage a big shop. Just learn on the job. As you can with most roles. Unless it is highly technical like medicine or engineering. Until relatively recently, you didn't need a degree to be a teacher or a nurse.

Overeducated? Not really. The UK has plenty of well-educated people, but it doesn’t place the same emphasis on higher education as some countries in continental Europe, where university is free and far more accessible.

The real issue is the belief that a university degree automatically guarantees success. Many people assume that once they graduate, opportunities will simply appear. In reality, this only applies to a small number of professions, such as medicine, law, and a few specialist fields where a degree is essential. For most careers, experience is far more valuable.

Employers tend to prefer candidates who can demonstrate real-world skills over those who only have academic knowledge. Someone with solid hands-on experience will almost always have the advantage over someone with a degree but little practical background. Theory has its place, but it cannot replace practical understanding, problem-solving, and proven ability in the workplace.

Clearly, the education you have received has not served you well, as you are coming across as rather obtuse (purposefully so?)
Of course you don't need a fucking PHD to work in a supermarket. I'm sure most people would prefer to be working in their area of interest.
However, needs must and sensible, hardworking people will choose working h within a different field - yep, even retail - in order to pay the bills and keep a roof over their heads.
It's really not that complicated, is it?

Some say jobs for these people are thin on the ground. Most here are saying we are actually undereducated as a country.
A lot here are saying people study these degrees out of interest and then choose to do something they enjoy as a career, and retail management is a common one.
I just don't understand why take £100k of student loan debt out of general interest alone. It's so many years of not working too. I assume people must be funded by parents up to a point as it doesn't make much sense financially to do two very difficult degrees for a hobby and then work in retail. Maybe someone here who has done this can give insight.

Of course it's not necessary to have a masters degree to work as a shop assistant. But that doesn't mean that people are being over-educated, exactly. I mean, if 25% of young people were taking degrees in media studies, that wouldn't be a wise investment for most of them and it wouldn't be ideal for the economy, but higher education isn't a bad thing overall. I think people should try to reach their potential, whatever that is and along the way, they will learn more about their strengths and weaknesses.

One of my friends is gifted in maths and has a PhD. He became a secondary school maths teacher, but the stress soon become too much for him and he left teaching to stack shelves in a supermarket. He now has a good job working in statistics for a large organisation.

I don't think its possible to be over educated.

The state of the job market is a seperate issue.

I feel like you are ignoring what a lot of people are saying.

People can do degrees, however funded, for whatever reason they would like, whether out of interest or to work in a specific field. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find jobs in these fields, so some 'settle' for jobs they are overqualified for. Others just enjoy retail etc.

You don't have to understand why, it's a personal choice. People get enjoyment out of learning - I do, and I'm lucky to have a job in my desired field!

It's lots of things - a symptom of the current employment market, skills shortage, impact of AI...

It's a shame if what she wanted was to be working in academia.

What it isnt, is a sign we're over-educating people.

I am also "not sure why" you are "raging" about it
For one it seems like an incredibly extreme over reaction to your son not getting a part time job, which he might not have got anyway.
For another, if you are "raging" about anything, it should be people being underemployed rather than overeducated.

Education is never a waste, but it is shameful that we as a country aren't taking advantage of people who could be far more beneficial in the roles they are trained in and want/are able to do. Which is of course not saying that there's anything wrong with anyone working in Lidl if that's what they want to do or what works for them at that point in their life.

Although of course this woman might end up using her corporate skills and quickly moving up the management chain in Lidl - it's not necessarily a dead end job. Their graduate managers start at over £40,000 plus new car, with guaranteed increases.

Op this doesn’t mean your 18yo won’t be considered for a job, I work in a big busy supermarket and there is a wide range between us all education wise and personality wise. Make his attributes stand out on a cv or in an interview, that’s all that can be done, that mum could have been on twenty or thirty interviews and she just clicked with that store. Best of luck to your son, tell him to keep going x

Actually anyone 33/34 or older will not have anywhere near 100k in debt, particularly the school mum you’re referring to.

Even younger people on plan 2 student finance will not total anything like 100k to do a masters.

Perhaps with more education you would know this? Your posts see full of media hyperboles.

i think it's a big mistake to think education is just - or even mainly - about employment. Being educated, rather, should be seen as important for having a good life: well-educated people are much more likely to live fulfilled lives than the poorly-educated, ceteris paribus. And a well-educated society, done properly, is surely better than a society of ignoramuses.

Regarding economic necessities and reasons why even educated young people find it difficult to get employment nowadays, consider: most of us are so indoctrinated by neo-liberalism and capitalist ideology we accept that automation, AI and all the rest, benefits only wealthy owners, rather than everyone (including those who are no longer required to do jobs lost to AI and robots).

AI has developed sufficiently even graduates aren't needed for many jobs? Fine: let's still pay those whose jobs are now done by robots even if they don't work at those lost jobs. Why not? The jobs are still getting done, the wealth produced still there: why should it not go to those who used to do the jobs rather than (often already-rich) bosses or shareholders?

In a rationally-ordered world we'd share wealth more equally. The results of AI taking people's jobs could be more leisure rather than penury for resulting unemployed individuals - leisure that might be used productively, for more education to the benefit of all perhaps?

Meanwhile, in the irrationally-ordered world we live in, it's still better for individuals to be educated rather than not. (My children (and their children, and their friends) are evidence of this. Trust me.)

I don’t think kids have the opportunity to get over educated . I do think the whole education system needs an overhaul and more could be done at school to prepare them for going into jobs rather than making them go on to higher education also I think it depends what the degrees are in .
My son in law got his so he could go into the medical field which he did but didn’t stay long as it was too high pressure , he’s now got a job doing something much less stressful . My daughter in law got hers as she wanted to go into psychology , she doesn’t do anything like that now.
I think it’s good to have one to show you have a certain standard of education and theres always going to be jobs that ask for degree standard employees but it’s not always essential unless you have to have one to get into a certain type of employment.
The majority of these kids don’t end up doing what they planned anyway . My son although intelligent only had GCEs and earns far higher wages as a floor layer than his friends that went on to uni .

Wtf? 😂

Also people’s careers change as time moves on.
I worked in a degree led field for 15 years. It was enjoyable, relevant to my degree and earned well.

Now I have children I don’t want corporate house. My job with a degree and my DH’s job which needed a masters and then post grad earned enough that now I can step back from my corporate role. I’ll probably be doing a light work role next year that I won’t need a degree for but it doesn’t mean my education or previous work experience is irrelevant.

Maybe you would just see me in a barely over minimum wage job with an irrelevant degree and judge. From my perspective a cushy 9-4 job I can leave on time and pick my kids up every day is all I need so I don’t want to work harder for more money because I don’t need to.

Even the 'educated' can't always string a sentence together or do basic maths. I am a perpetual student myself and it amazes me how underprepared some people are on the courses I've done.

I am very educated but I fully expect I will end up working in Next or similar once I run out of paid education opportunities. I am doing a Phd next. Fortunately I have paid my house off so I don't need a high salary and can afford to do this. Obviously, I hope I will eventually end up with a job in academia, but I'm not stupid; it probably won't happen.

I don't think people are over-educated. Uni has just been a natural progression for young people without it really being necessary. Hence now nearly everyone has a degree so not many people stand out as actually being well educated.

I think you’ll find that’s because Labour has utterly fucked the jobs market. I’d say UK doesn’t educate children to compete with other European countries, so no I don’t think we’re over qualified. We are currently a very low growth economy.

Education is a massive problem in this country. It's polarised - so many people with degrees that are not being used in the workplace, and at the other end, ever increasing numbers of people barely literate and numerate and completely incapable of working to any reasonable standard.

We've just not moved on with the entire education system as the World around us has changed. Schools still teach the same subjects as they did 50 years ago when they should have moved to "skills" based teaching rather than subject/memory based. We scrapped the "technical" education system of Polytechnics and turned them into Unis, often providing substandard education or workplace-useless degrees. Colleges are all about literacy and numeracy to school leavers who left school without GCSEs. Adult education has been completely scrapped. And of course, there's barely any trades training - just token gestures from schools still teaching wooden fish and colleges who can't get teachers so their "trades" pupils are often spending most time doing admin/paperwork side of things rather than hands-on training. Many schools still aren't teaching computing to any decent level yet it's clearly the future.

What an absolute mess! No forethought at all over the decades.

Since when is education a bad thing!? I guess if you ache for a right wing govt whose wet dream is uneducated people who will vote for them so they can screw working and middle class people, you have a point.

So your DS is 18 and chasing a management job? I'm glad Lidl are choosing people with life experience and not kids straight from school. How many 18yr olds truely have the people skills to lead and motivate employees who probably have many years experience and now a lot more about the job than the actual manager

I doubt whether an applicant for an entry-level job at Lidl would be advantaged by having an MSc or PhD - in fact the opposite as they would know it is just a temporary stop-gap and the person will be moving on as soon as possible.

It will depend on your industry! I’m not talking about hard technical skills but in my experience of my organisation, there are lots of people highly educated, who I am sure are experts in their chosen academic field but lack basic time management skills including failing to respond to emails, turning up to meetings late or not turning up at all with no apologies, failing to complete work by deadlines but don’t communicate blockers to team members who they have dependencies with, all of which might be perfectly fine when you’re working independently, but not so much when you’re part of a multidisciplinary team. My degree had no team elements and was a highly solo endeavour so I can imagine others are too - I’m seeing more and more people start the workplace without collaboration and communication skills.

I work in project management so my job often involves distilling complex information from a range of stakeholders into a handful of slides, to present to senior colleagues to make a decision in a condensed timeframe. Increasingly, there are colleagues starting the work place that don’t want to give presentations and don’t feel comfortable doing so or haven’t any experience of doing so but they still want that specific position. My degree forced us to do these elements in seminars, being comfortable articulating arguments and defending them in front of peers which perhaps is not true of more recent grads of the COVID generation where a lot of teaching moved online.

I guess what I’m saying is - being able to research and write a fantastic academic paper is absolutely a key skill that can be used in some workplaces - but it’s only one small part of what makes someone successful and I wonder if the way university degrees are set up now means some of the emphasis on softer skills to supplement academic knowledge are not as refined.