Graduates struggling to get graduate jobs

Today’s ONS release will make pretty grim reading for students and recent graduates. It shows that the unemployment rate among recent graduates — those who graduated in the last six years — stands at 9.1 per cent, higher than the overall unemployment rate of 8.4 per cent. It’s even worse for those who graduated in the last two years — the unemployment rate among them is 18.9 per cent, up from 10 per cent before the recession.

But there’s an even more worrying trend among those recent graduates who do find employment. In 2001, three-quarters of them were in ‘higher skill’ jobs — those requiring more than GCSEs. Now, less than two-thirds of them are:

So what does this mean? Well, ten years ago 67 per cent of graduates found graduate-level jobs. Now just 55 per cent do. It’s a stark reminder that Labour’s push to get as many people as possible to go to university didn’t benefit all those who did.