I was promised university would be a path to employment. This was a lie.

Source: The Telegraph

A high-achieving graduate with a first-class degree and a master’s describes being £48,000 in debt, receiving 200+ job rejections, and working part-time reception despite doing “everything right.”

For decades, university has been sold as the default route to upward mobility.

But in the mean time, three things changed quietly:

• Degrees scaled faster than graduate jobs

• Employers shifted toward experience and social fluency

• Student loans expanded with optimistic earnings assumptions

The result: more credentials, same bottleneck.

The system didn’t break suddenly.

It diluted slowly.

Universities are incentivized to enroll, not place.

Governments are incentivized to promote participation, not outcomes.

Employers are incentivized to minimize hiring risk.

Each actor is rational in isolation.

But together, they create a pipeline where:

Education signals effort

Experience signals employability

And networks signal trust

Students are told the first is enough.

The market quietly prices the other two higher.

This isn’t about degrees losing value.

It’s about information asymmetry.

Students optimize for grades.

Employers screen for readiness.

Families repeat outdated rules.

Meanwhile, cultural capital — language, confidence, norms — compounds quietly.

The real divide isn’t intelligence.

It’s exposure.

University still works.

But not as a guarantee — only as a component.

The hidden shift:

Education moved from “ticket” to “filter.”

From entry pass to sorting mechanism.

The predicament of the next generation won’t be:

“What should I study?”

It’ll be:

“What game am I actually entering?”

Because the rules have changed dramatically, yet nobody bothered to update the script.

The tragedy here isn’t the debt.

It’s outsourcing life decisions to a narrative  written for a different era.