BBC NewsBorrowing was £17.4bn last month, the second highest October figure since monthly records began in 1993.
Finito World
There is a quietly disturbing number buried in this week’s labour market data: over 700,000 university graduates in the UK are currently out of work and claiming benefits. Of these, some 400,000 are on Universal Credit, while a further 240,000 are not working due to health reasons—a number that has more than doubled since 2019.
These are not the “NEET” statistics of old – disadvantaged young people struggling to find a path. These are graduates. Many of them highly credentialled, debt-laden, and yet without footholds in the economy. And while the overall graduate employment rate remains strong – 88% of working-age graduates in employment – the presence of this growing cohort on the margins demands a deeper interrogation of what’s going wrong.
At the heart of this story is a misalignment between higher education and the labour market. For decades, British education policy has chased a university-first model, rewarding institutions for expansion, encouraging students into degrees without a parallel focus on vocational alternatives, and fostering the illusion that a diploma alone guarantees a career.
What the data now shows is a more fragmented, anxiety-prone reality. Graduates are not struggling because they are unqualified in the abstract. They are struggling because they are mismatched to the actual shape of the economy – emerging into a labour market that privileges soft skills, digital fluency, adaptability, and sector-specific experience over credentialism for its own sake.
More concerning still is the health overlay: 240,000 graduates not in work due to long-term illness is not a side-note, it is a signal. It speaks to a deeper malaise—a generation not only struggling economically but in many cases suffering mentally and physically from the dislocation that follows unmet expectations. We encouraged them to go to university. We didn’t build a bridge from there to the world of work.
Of course, the government is not blind to this. The £1.5 billion investment into training and apprenticeships is welcome, as is the Jobs Guarantee scheme for young people, with employers like Tesco and E.ON already on board. But a cultural recalibration is also needed. We must elevate technical and vocational routes with the same reverence we’ve historically reserved for university. And we must integrate employability—real-world skills, placement opportunities, mentoring—into degree programmes themselves, not as afterthoughts but as structural components.
As Sir Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice points out, level four apprentices earn £5,000 more on average than university graduates five years on. These are data points that should reframe how we talk to the next generation. What counts is not the prestige of the route taken, but its power to deliver dignity, income, contribution—and hope.
At Finito, we know that a degree is not a destination—it’s a signal. But what matters is how it’s activated: through guidance, upskilling, real exposure to real work. Until the education system internalises that truth, we will keep graduating young people into uncertainty—and eventually, bitterness.
There is still time to correct course. But the 700,000 are not a blip. They are a warning.
