Slightly off at a tangent, but Tony Blair's decision to scrap polytechnics and make them universities (thus tripling the amount of unis overnight and so the amount of students) was probably the worse thing this country did. Smack on that his aim of having 50% degree educated and we are where we are today.
Students going to ****e Universities, studying half baked degrees (photography, sociology, David Beckham Football studies, etc.) a huge amount treating it as a 3 year **** up and leaving with nothing, and all the while expecting to leave and walk into a £30k/£40k salary just because they have a piece of paper.
Who advised Government that we needed 50% of the population degree educated anyways?
In the past 30-40 years we have seen a rapidly increasing supply of labour combined with a rapidly decreasing supply of jobs.
In the past 40 years we have seen: 'liberalisation' of the workforce - previously it was the norm to have 1 parent working per household. The introduction of women into the workforce, where now it seems the 'stay at home mother' is the most hated demographic by the likes of the Labour party (how dare they put family before stressing themselves into oblivion to find a god awful job as a middle manager), has effectively DOUBLED the supply of labour in certain industries. I don't see any doubling of the number of jobs available.
Secondly, over the past 40 years we have seen the complete uninterrupted outsourcing of every single job possible to Asia. It isn't just textile industries making teddy bears. It's high technology industries, British technologly, British Company, British Name - but the workforce is in China. The number of jobs lost in the west is absolutely monumental, it is 10s of millions
http://www.ibtimes.com/28-million-us-jobs-lost-china-joined-wto-study-316232. There is one Ipad factory in China that employs 100k people that I read about - imagine if that factory was here in the UK. Obviously, I expect people to arrogantly dismiss the worth of these jobs, but I say: enjoy living off the government then, because that is who has had to pick up the bill for the devastation this outsourcing has caused.
Even in those Clegg/Farage debates, Clegg had the audacity to use an example of a Ford factory leaving the UK and why it HAD to stay in the EU - only for it later to emerge that the factory had been moved to TURKEY.
It isn't just manufacturing industries either, service industries are also lost - we all know the problems we have with Indian call centres. But what about maintenance industries, for perhaps our communication networks? Other than the man being sent to literally fix a mobile base station, with the internet now it makes no difference whether the control 'hub' for Telefonica in the UK is based in Slough, Leeds, or the Phillipines. No difference at all. In time, where do you think these jobs will go? I lived with a Radio Planner in Sweden, 80 jobs were lost from highly skilled Engineers when their office was relocated to Asia in 2012. The same will happen, in time over here.
And then lastly, we have also had immigration on a scale of several orders of magnitude greater than anything in history. These people coming here are not in the majority specialised Professors, or Engineers, or Doctors, they are just the average 'prole' who at best does nothing other than further increase the supply of labour, and at worst the list can go on forever.
If you have common sense and can see the basic principle of supply and demand, you can work out that with these factors, wages for the majority of people in the west are only going to go one way, and that is down - and they have done. We are in a generation now where it is now just expected that the government tops up your wages to a livable level.
Increasing the number of people going to university, was probably just a way of trying to alleviate some pressure on the jobs market, because the Government either doesn't want to, or is too spineless to address the other issues.
If 2 million people were taken out of university and had to find jobs what do you think would happen?
