I paid £50k for my degree – now I’m on Universal Credit’

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/jobs/work-benefits/university-graduates-claiming-universal-credit/

Posted by coffeewalnut08

10 comments

  1. That’s sad but also everything that’s wrong with our country. It’s knocking back social mobility ten fold.

  2. This is at least the second article in two weeks from from the Telegraph where the headline is trying to suggest that university will lead to you being on benefits yet the actual content of the article suggests the opposite.

    They have a table which they titled “employment rates for graduates dip” and indeed they did decrease by 0.7% from 87.2% to 86.5%, yet for non-graduates it decreased by 1.9% to 70.3%. Moreover, high skilled employment rates increased for both, while the unemployment rate decreased by 0.1% for graduates and INCREASED by 1.1% for non-graduates.

    They also have a graph of the number of graduate vacancies for each year, and while it is less in 2025 than other years, peak graduate vacancies (around October time) in 2024 and 2023 were around the same and much higher than 2022, suggesting that people are just filling these roles earlier. Obviously we’re yet to see how that will play out this year.

    They had to mention the 600,000 focus graduates which are on universal credit – the headline of their other article. This of course ignores that fact this was only 11% of UC claimants. That data literally showed that 5% of graduates were on UC compared to 25% of non-graduates.

    I have no idea why the telegraph wants to discourage people from higher education. Perhaps because they want less people with the critical thinking skills to look past their blatantly misleading headlines?

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  4. Don’t worry I’m paying their degree off with my interest 😒

  5. They haven’t spent 50k then … so far they’ve spent nothing.

  6. There’s so many people who act like they were lied to about university, if you didn’t see this as a risk going in that’s totally on you.

  7. AI is going to devastate white collar workers, meanwhile blue collar meatbags like me will still be needed.

  9. So many students don’t actually put effort in. If you don’t apply for internships in your desired field during summer holidays in-between both years you are almost certainly going to be unemployed come graduation.

    Then you get graduates who are unreasonable in their expectation, thinking they have a degree they deserve a ‘graduate job’.

    Everyone in my peer group, 90% have degrees, all started at the bottom and worked up. Sure in some cases the degree helped them move up quicker, but it’s extremely rare for a degree in itself to let you skip the grunt work.

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