The great university rip-off?

There's a piece in the Guardian today which claims that many university graduates are now doing jobs which a decade ago, wouldn't have required a degree, and that those not from Oxbridge and headed towards the financial sector won't earn more than a non-graduate, while being burdened by debts. The argument is that while it's fine to shovel everyone into university to produce a highly skilled workforce, the jobs requiring these skills haven't turned up. So you get graduates doing non-graduate jobs, and the kids who didn't go to university don't get anything at all.

Ewart Keep, an economist at Cardiff, takes the example of a young man who studied history or social science at a former poly and comes out with a middling degree: "Statistically, he's unlikely to earn any more than if he'd simply left school at 18." Keep, together with his colleague Ken Mayhew, argues that the reason the Great Degree Scramble has not paid off in better jobs is because Labour did not try to provide them. That would have required nurturing new businesses and raising conditions for the most awful jobs – the sort of thing Blair and his party emphatically did not do.

Your thoughts? Has your degree proved useful or necessary? If you haven't graduated, what job do you think you'll get? Is it a matter of which degree and institution? How much do you owe?

Certainly judging by the appalling standard of the teams on University Challenge last night, more young folk should be toiling in the fields rather than sipping sherry in tutorials!