Jacob Solon: It’s time Conservatives faced the fact that university doesn’t work for most young people

Jacob Solon is a recent History and Politics graduate standing in the 2026 local elections as a Conservative Councillor candidate in Camden.

With recent week’s A-level results confirming a record number of young people heading to university, the reality is that for many, a degree has become a waste of time and money. It saddles them with debt and leaves them with a qualification they often did not need in the first place.

Ever since Tony Blair set the target of 50 per cent of young adults entering higher education in his Labour Party conference speech on September 28, 1999, the value of a degree has steadily diminished. Debts have grown, while the real potential of Britain’s young people has been stifled rather than unlocked.

In 1990, before Blair’s university reforms, tuition for British students was effectively free, with the state covering fees and providing maintenance grants. A university degree carried strong value, and graduates were highly likely to secure relevant jobs soon after leaving university.

Today, the annual cost of university has climbed to £9,250, and this is set to rise further, with Sir Keir Starmer planning the first tuition fee increase in eight years to £9,535 from September 2025. At the same time, the graduate job market has become saturated, meaning that many graduates will never secure employment directly related to their degree.

As a result, a growing number have expressed that university has devalued the time and money they invested in their education.

A typical undergraduate on a three-year course now leaves university with around £53,000 of debt. Once their salary passes £25,000, they must begin repaying 9 per cent of their income, plus interest, every month for the next 40 years, almost up until retirement.

Many students are led to believe that a degree guarantees a graduate-level job in their chosen field, but this is far from reality. An entire generation of graduates has discovered, often too late, that such opportunities are scarce. The market is oversaturated, with their now being 140 applicants per graduate job.

Today, one in seven young people are unemployed and vacancies are at a four-year low. The white-collar market has already been completely over saturated and now with a record amount of more students going to university, it’s going to become harder and harder to get a graduate job.

The fact is, half of people don’t need a university degree. According to Indeed Hiring Lab, “the percentage of job postings in the United Kingdom that explicitly require a Bachelor’s or more advanced degree has remained steady at around 4.6 per cent for several years.”

Before Blair’s university reforms, an appropriate amount of people went to university. By the late 1980s, around 14 per cent of people went to university. The Government could afford to pay for 14 per cent of people going to university –  but not 50 per cent.

University is now run by big business, property developers, and letting businesses. They don’t care about educating people, they just want more and more students to enroll and use them as a cash cow. I know someone who studied English Literature at the University of Westminster, and her final dissertation focused on “power struggles in The Hunger Games.”

Another friend of mine recently graduated with a degree in Outdoor Adventure and Filmmaking. Yet this is a field where a degree is unnecessary; he would have gained far more by learning on the job rather than at university. Instead, he has taken on huge amounts of debt, misled by the false premise that higher education is essential.

Among all my friends who graduated alongside me a year ago, almost none have found work in their field of study. Most have taken jobs that do not require a degree at all.

The stigma British society attaches to those without a degree is illogical, harmful, and has let down an entire generation of young people. University costs far too much, provides qualifications of little value for the majority of people, and has left many with degrees that do not match the needs of the job market.

I am writing this article as a call to action for the Conservative Party to oppose the Labour Government’s continued push for more people to attend university. I acknowledge that the Conservatives carried on Blair’s misguided policy, and in 2019 the symbolic milestone of 50 per cent of young people attending university was reached.

However, now there is a real opportunity to challenge these plans, work to reverse them, and recognise that the policy has been a failed experiment.

In reality, only about 15 per cent of people need to go to university. We should expand apprenticeships and revive polytechnics that train people in the practical skills genuinely required in the workplace – and put an end to the damaging lie that not attending university makes someone less intelligent.