A friend of mine has been rejected by the university of her choice, despite last week having achieved three As at A-level. What’s going on?
In my Sunday Mirror column today, I write about this and about how there are nearly one million unemployed young people in Britain aged between 16 and 24, at least 100,000 of whom are graduates. We are grappling with the consequences of a demographic spike: a mini-baby boom at the end of the 1980s means that there are many more young people in Britain aged 20 than there are those aged ten or 30.
Because of high unemployment, especially among the young, and because of Labour’s misguided top-down prescriptions and stipulations on student numbers, university applications are rising. But there aren’t enough places to meet the demand. The result is that we are creating a “lost generation” of young people who cannot get a job or a place at university.
In addition, of course, many graduates are burdened by debt in the form of student loans — read my estimable colleague Laurie Penny on this. It’s as if we have set up a committee with the sole purpose of creating an education system that deliberately discriminates against the least well-off.
Why even aspire to go to university when you know you will leave in debt and then struggle to find a job afterwards? It’s all right if you have rich parents to support you through your student years and then on through the restlessness and uncertainty that can follow. But only the fortunate few can say that.
Our system of educational apartheid, in which the richest 10 per cent or so buy themselves out of the state sector, is already the most unfair in Europe. The abolition of the grammar schools merely contributed to the unfairness, as the admirable Conservative MP Graham Brady understands. If you’ve got money, you can buy a good education in Britain and all the advantages that follow. If you haven’t, good luck.
The move to create the new A-level grade of A* will further privilege the rich and discriminate against state schools. As Peter Wilby writes in this week’s issue of the New Statesman magazine: “The proportion of exam candidates from fee-paying schools awarded an A* is at least three times higher than the proportion from state schools.”
It is scandalous that, in its 13 years of power, New Labour did not abolish the charitable status of public schools. These schools are businesses, many of them with extensive landowning interests, and they should be taxed as such.
Now, against the backdrop of the great recession and because of the coming spending cuts, universities are sure to contract. Signs saying “We’re full up” are being pinned to campus gates all over the country.
Pity the lost generation.
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