A DEGREE OF DISMAY

Is a university degree a definite passport to a career? Many young graduates in Britain don't obtain what they set out to achieve at the beginning of their studies. Cathy Scott Clark and Ciaran Bryan report on the young people's reaction to the graduate glutt and on how the government intends to resolve or at least reduce this growing problem.

From The Sunday Times

Francesca Canty thought she had the CV of a high-flyer. As a teenager she won a scholarship to a private school, taking top grades in her A-levels in French, English and history. She studied for a degree in Russian and French at Clare College, Cambridge, and expected glistening prizes when she went down. Two years on, all she has to show for her education is a job as a secretary, working in the city at the "glistening bank", the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

For Canty the fast track has been closed off. This is no temping stopgap, this is where she must build her career. Any hope of joining the higher layer of executive life has to be hard-fought in the new meritocracy where everybody has a degree. During a fruitless search for a career in which she could use her languages Canty has stuffed envelopes, worked as a temp for £6 an hour and done voluntary work. At least as a secretary with the EBRD she occasionally gets to speak Russian. "This is the best job so far. I grab opportunities when I see them to make my work more interesting. I'm surrounded by talented graduates who are all secretaries or clerks, said Canty, 29, who was the first of her family to go to university

We're all questioning our futures. Surely we studied to do more than this? There is a sense of resentment about being offered jobs that would have been filled by secretarial college-leavers five years ago." Canty is typical of the new generation of graduates who are having to accept low-paid, mundane clerical jobs in the realisation that a degree, even from Oxbridge, is no longer a passport to a career, never mind a golden future.

A clerical position as close as possible to the desired career path is seen by many as the best they can hope for. This bitter pragmatism is confirmed by a government study which found that almost half the graduates going into full-time employment in the service industries, including retailing, banking and finance, are now in "non-graduate" jobs. They are secretaries, clerks and office juniors earning salaries of £8,000.

More students are rolling off the higher education assembly line than ever before, smashing expectations of a structured career and forcing employers to reconsider how best to select the few they need for the fast track. Although the l990s expansion of higher education for all has been celebrated, it is proving to have far reaching repercussions, causing some to ask: "What is a degree worth when everybody has one?"

Alan Smithers, professor of education at Machester University, says modern students are so desperate to make themselves attractive to employers that they have lost sight of the true purpose of university. "In the past a degree wasn't really a qualification for anything. University education was about self-development," he said. He concedes that higher education is a "sieve" used by employers looking for intellectual ability' but even that rough measure is becoming increasingly redundant as the engine of higher education churns out graduates. Not surprisingly, employers are adjusting their tactics. "Jobs done 10 years ago by 16-year-old school-leavers were five years ago being done by those with A-levels. Now it's graduates. It's an inevitable effect of mass higher education", said Smithers.

The future for the next generation of students looks bleak.