When a university degree won’t get you a decent job or home | Letters

Readers respond to an article by Gaby Hinsliff on declining employment opportunities for young graduatesThe university degree was never a guaranteed ticket to a good career. I graduated from Cambridge about the same time as Gaby Hinsliff (We told young people that degrees were their ticket to a better life. It’s become a great betrayal, 13 May). Without middle-class connections, or “professional” work experience, I returned home after graduation to a neighbourhood counted among the 1% most deprived in England, in a post-industrial northern city with a crumbling social infrastructure. I had £30 to my name and took a job worse than the one I’d had while at school in order to live.To get to London, where there was a greater range of jobs, I did non-graduate work for a few years, sofa-surfing to begin with. Like today’s graduates, I had to do further study to get a decent job, and I was just shy of 40 when I managed to get a career job. I guess it is a better life in the end, as the alternative may well have been a cycle of bad jobs and unemployment. Continue reading...

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