Mark O’Brien: Today’s freshers know a degree is not a golden ticket

In town after provincial town, disorderly queues are reappearing outside dormant nightclubs while the proprietors of all-night kebab shops breathe a collective sigh of relief. At last, students are going back to their halls for the start of a new academic year.

For some of course it’s the very beginning. Concealed anxiously among the throng of wise old hands traversing campus courtyards are another cohort of freshers – 18 years young, an entire world laid open before them. Five years ago, I was one of them. I arrived at Oxford University when Northern Rock’s signage was still in place at its branch on the town’s High Street. I paid for my first term’s accommodation out of my Bradford & Bingley savings book. Never such innocence again.

Across the Atlantic, Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection just a matter of days before I moved in. The cataclysm had already happened, but we were too saturated with ill-informed opinions and doom-mongering predictions to know what to make of it. For that Class of 2008, we were still sure enough that our university degree was a solid gold ticket to a good career in which we could make a great name for ourselves.

For those waking up to their first 9am lectures today, there are no more illusions. The annual £3,000 I was charged for my tuition seems like pocket change compared to the nine grand which students today are expected to fork out once they start earning. One in 10 of last year’s university graduates was still out of work six months later, while a further 15 per cent had returned to full-time education. As many as a third of those who did find a job meanwhile were working in roles that did not require a degree, while almost 10,000 university leavers were working in what the sociology graduates would call “elementary occupations” – a small army of bright and educated twenty-somethings stacking shelves or adding numbers to spreadsheets each and every day.

The innocence may be gone, but the hope seems to linger. The dramatic hike in tuition fees faced by today’s students coupled with a tepid graduate jobs market have failed to deter very many students from applying and taking up their places at university. For those who have left home and are settling into their halls or busy working out which lectures they can afford to miss, what can they expect? What would I tell them that nobody told me five years ago?

Above all, any student starting now has to enjoy themselves. When politicians and columnists talk about the costs and the benefits to the nation of a university-educated workforce, it is too often left unsaid that for 18-year olds leaving home for the first time it is a chance to meet new people from far and wide, to broaden their horizons and their ambitions, to pursue their old galvanising passions and discover whole new ones.

The stark reality facing those who graduated two years ago like me and those who will graduate three years from now is that the piece of paper we received at the end of it all is not worth as much as it once was.

A 21-year old entering the jobs market nowadays armed with a 2:1 degree is going to have to get to the back of a rather long queue. For those starting this autumn, that surely means that they have to find some other way to stand out.

On some university campuses there is an unhealthy obsession with totting up as many CV points as possible. Students often wage unholy wars to win a seat on the committee of the Oxford Investment & Finance Society, or the Warwick Strategy & Consulting Society, or the Leeds University Finance, Accounting & Business (FAB) Society – all real and no doubt thriving student societies.

You have to wonder whether students at Leeds would be better off spending their term at the networking lunches of FAB Soc, or taking time out at the university’s Baking Society, its Quidditch Society, or its Punk & Ska Society.

It may be a counter-intuitive proposition for students embarking on their university journey now. But when so many graduates are vying to outpace each other, perhaps all that students can do is enjoy the time they have, meet people, have fun, and of course spend many fine evenings at the Quidditch Society.

*Mark O’Brien, from Leeds, is a graduate of Oxford University.