From PhDs to PHDs: The £100,000 Graduate Con
For too many kids, the only “graduate premium” is a private hire licence, a half-empty tank of diesel, and the long road out to the NEC.
A-level results are in, GCSE results also in and while some school kids and sixth-formers are popping corks, plenty more are staring at a set of grades that didn’t quite go to plan.
So what now? Do the sixth formers scrabble around in clearing, grab a course at a “lesser” university and grit their teeth? Or do they swerve the whole thing and head straight into work? A CV lesson for those school kids a couple of years behind them.
For years the answer has been peddled as obvious: get yourself to uni. Supposedly it’s a golden ticket to middle-class respectability, a graduate job, and — if you believe the sales pitch — a £100,000 lifetime earnings premium. That line has been repeated by ministers, civil servants and schools for decades. Only problem: it’s not true.
Degrees of Disappointment
Britain has some superb universities, and some degrees that transform lives. But it’s also got ropey ones, dishing out qualifications that cost a fortune and deliver little more than disappointment and debt. Successive governments know this. They’ve got the data: the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) system matches tax records to courses and shows exactly how much graduates from each uni and subject actually earn.
And the truth? It’s brutal. Yes, maths at Cambridge, economics at Bath, computing at Southampton and law at Oxford do exactly what it says on the tin. They’re rocket fuel for salaries. But for one in five graduates, university leaves them financially worse off than if they’d never gone at all. And that’s before you factor in three years’ lost earnings and a so-called “debt” that’s really a 30-year tax.
The Other PhD
Which brings us neatly to Britain’s fastest-growing qualification: the PHD — Private Hire Driver. Not a doctorate in philosophy, but — as we call it in the Midlands — a licence to drive private hire.
And not just any old runaround. We’re talking about ferrying punters out to the NEC, meter ticking all the way. That’s the kind of “graduate premium” many students end up with: not a six-figure salary, but a back seat full of passengers and the occasional sick bag.
In the West Midlands, there are over 23,000 private hire drivers; in Birmingham alone, more than 11,000. In London, studies suggest more than 30 per cent of cabbies have degrees. Run the numbers and you’re looking at perhaps 60,000 graduates nationwide driving private hire vehicles. That’s a PhD of sorts, but not quite the one Mum and Dad pictured on graduation day.
Politicians and the £100,000 Fairy Tale
And how did we get here? Blame the fairy tale spun in Westminster. Take David Willetts, nicknamed “Two Brains” by admirers. Whether either brain was plugged into reality is another matter.
Back in 2013, Willetts — now Lord Willetts of Havant — solemnly reassured the public:
“There is a real incentive for working hard… the premium is still comfortably over £100,000 in lifetime earnings after tax.”
A neat soundbite, perfect for PowerPoints and party conferences. Useless, though, to a Wolverhampton media studies graduate stacking shelves in Aldi.
The Department for Education joined the chorus, issuing its own triumphalist line:
“Graduates enjoy £100k earnings bonus over lifetime.”
No footnotes, no caveats. Just a handy sales pitch to keep teenagers signing up for loans.
Then along came Willetts’s successor, Jo Johnson — Boris’s younger brother — keen to play Top Trumps with the numbers. In a 2017 speech to Universities UK he claimed:
“Graduates on average still enjoy a large wage premium, worth some £170,000 additional earnings over a lifetime for a man, and £250,000 for a woman.”
Big, shiny figures. But meaningless to the thousands who never see them. Because averages are statistical fig-leaves. They hide the fact that plenty of graduates in the Midlands and beyond end up in jobs paying no more — and often less — than those who skipped university altogether.
Blair’s Big Mistake
This all goes back to Tony Blair’s target: get 50 per cent of kids into university. It sounded modern, aspirational, forward-thinking. In reality, it was naive. Not all degrees are equal. Expanding the numbers without expanding quality simply flooded the market with graduates chasing too few graduate jobs. Meanwhile, vocational training was left to wither, sneered at as second-best.
Result? A nation short of welders, plumbers and care workers — but awash with debt-saddled sociology graduates.
And then there was the great mis-selling trick. Blair didn’t have the bottle to call tuition fees what they really were: a graduate tax. Instead, he dressed it up as “student loans” — a word guaranteed to strike fear into middle-class parents. “Debt” sounds crippling. “Tax” sounds boring but survivable. In reality, today’s graduates just pay an extra slice of tax on earnings above a threshold, wiped after 30 years.
The young get it. My own kids shrug it off — they see it as a marginal tax rate, not a debt. They leave the outrage to us over-40s, still muttering about their “£50,000 millstone.” The ones, like me, who think a GCSE is an ‘O’ level.
Misselling the Dream
So what we’ve got is a system built on smoke and mirrors. Schools are judged by how many kids they push into university, not whether it makes financial sense. Ministers wheel out shiny averages about six-figure premiums while ignoring the one in five for whom it’s a net loss. And universities happily play along, chasing tuition fees from home students and premium fees from international ones.
The result? Many graduates at 26 earn less than an experienced McDonald’s shift manager. Nothing wrong with McDonald’s — but it rather punctures the idea of higher education as a one-way ticket to prosperity.
Honesty, At Last
So what’s the fix? Honesty. Full transparency. Publish the LEO data in a form every 17-year-old can click on their phone. Show them: here’s your likely salary if you study law at Birmingham, or business at Wolverhampton, or philosophy at Coventry. Let them decide with eyes wide open.
Yes, some degrees are worth their weight in gold. But others? They’re worth little more than a PHD badge and a satnav. Until the government stops peddling fairy tales and starts publishing the truth, it’s guilty of mis-selling. Just like flogging clapped-out motors with the mileage wound back.
Because right now, for too many kids in the West Midlands, the only “graduate premium” is a private hire licence, a half-empty tank of diesel, and the long road out to the NEC.