Polytechnics beat Oxbridge

A story after my own heart in the Sunday Times today.  If you want to get ahead – get a polytechnic education.   Well maybe I am misquoting the findings of the most recent graduate unemployment league table – but they do make interesting reading.  Or maybe say something about the type of students that go so far as to fill in questionnaires of this type.

 

The second thing that surprised me was that I have never heard of the best university in the entire UK for would-be job-seekers.  Top of the tree came Robson Gordon University – which is in Aberdeen apparently.  Second came Edinburgh’s Napier University.  As both these august academic establishments are north of the border, their lucky students graduate without the millstone of a student debt as well as enhanced job prospects.  A queue must be forming at their doors already.

 

Now I doubt Oxford and Cambridge colleges are panicking just yet, nor second tier universities such as Bristol, Bath, Durham, etc in the well-established snobbery leagues of University desirability.  But with unemployment soaring in the young and student debt reaching epidemic proportions in the depths of a recession…. It is food for thought at the very least.

 

However, as with most things it depends how you read the statistics.  You could write the same story only highlighting the fact that going to an ex-polytechnic might actually harm your job prospects.  As the journo points out the University of Middlesex saw its unemployed student rate more than double last year.

 

However, Oxford and Cambridge have also suffered because of the drop in numbers of  the traditional ‘milk round’ employers such as the financial sector and law firms.   Official figures now show that the number of jobless under 25s has risen from 700,000 to just under a million in the last year – a pretty spectacular rise by any stretch of the imagination.

 

Amusingly (but not surprisingly) the jobless youngster toal is now far higher than it was in John Major’s era, when the then-Labour shadow trade secretary (a certain Gordon Brown) warned of a lost generation …made in Downing Street.  Prescient words indeed.

 

All of this is a far cry from what the government was hoping for when they targeted massive increases in youngsters reaching university education as part of a cunning scheme to massage the unemployment figures.  When you add in the not unimportant fact that parents and students are now expected to pay for their university education – and get deep into debt, the current outlook does not make happy ready.

 

Maybe the way forward is not so much a gap year – as a gap career.  Cynics amongst us spotted the obvious flaw in creating this debt mountain.  Why not clear off abroad and wave bye bye to student debt, recession – and the gloomy prognosis of an aging population?