Image Credit: Poppy Mills

Being a young person in the UK today feels hopeless. There’s a whole generation struggling to visualise a future for themselves, unable to see a route to achieve the economic and cultural milestones expected of post-university life. The failed promise that going to university guarantees you a well-paying job is starting to feel less like a guarantee and more like a fantasy.

With economic turbulence and AI taking work away from people, graduate positions are an invaluable golden ticket students must battle for. There are simply too many graduates for the amount of graduate jobs, with the BBC reporting a 15 per cent rise in application rates. The competition for these roles is higher than ever. The Guardian reported that youth unemployment overall is at 15.3 per cent. Other than during the Covid-19 pandemic, this is the highest youth unemployment rate since 2015. Applying to dozens, potentially nearly hundreds of jobs and getting only a couple of interviews has somehow become the norm even for those with great university grades and extracurriculars to boost their CVs.

This means many students will spend most of their final year of university, when they should be investing time in studying and savouring student life, focused on applying for every graduate job they can find. These application processes are stressful and debilitating, and the standard is so high you’re expected to be an expert to compete with your fellow applicants. It’s as if it’s no longer the norm that a university student should be a beginner in their field, which was the point of graduate jobs in the first place. A common sentiment I’ve been hearing thrown around all of my final year of university is that applying for graduate jobs is simply “wasting your time.” It’s hard not to be bitter when you invest so much money, time and effort into your studies, only to not receive the outcome you were sold at the end: a career.

On top of balancing studies, social life and trying to secure a job after graduating, HEPI reported over two thirds of undergraduate students take on part time jobs whilst studying. This means many students are accustomed to long hours of labour, potentially spending as much time working as they do studying, just to afford university life. In spite of this, young people will still get labeled as lazy. But publications such as the BBC have observed a trend of every generation thinking of the next as lazy, entitled and unprincipled, proving this stereotype has little substance. Students are not complaining because they are entitled: they criticising a system that sets them up for failure

Student loan interest increasing and the repayment period being extended means that many graduates, even after years of working to pay their loan, end up owing more than they borrowed in the first place. This has been mostly discussed online, with many people arguing that graduates shouldn’t complain as they knew these terms when they signed up for the loan. I find this ridiculously harsh. What other choice do young people have? Most students, even those from extremely wealthy backgrounds, must take out loans to afford university. The graduates who are easily able to pay off their debt are the lucky few. And if you argue no one is forcing young people to go to university: sure, no one forces you. But you do have the message that university is the route to a well-paid job and a successful career is rammed down your throat, inevitably making you feel that university is simply the natural next step in life. The debt has become a necessary evil required to access university study, and increasingly it’s becoming a barrier. I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually higher education is something only the wealthy have access to unless we see systemic change soon. And of course, university doesn’t even support most students into a well-paid career.

The difficulties to get a high-paying job (or any job for that matter) make the cost of living crisis exponentially more difficult. The rising price of rent, food and other essentials mean young people are less able to save money, and getting on the property ladder feels impossible. What makes this even worse is the judgement young people can face for not scrupulously saving every penny, for daring to ‘frivolously’ spend. This is an observed phenomenon coined by Leonard Lauder as ‘The Lipstick Effect’: the theory that consumers spend more on small luxuries to treat themselves when facing an economic crisis. While this theory, originally proposed during the early 2000s recession, referred to the purchases of less expensive luxury items like cosmetics or tech goods, we can see this transpiring now with even cheaper goods, like coffee, sweet treats or alcohol. We can even observe this through the rise in popularity of trinkets, such as bag charms or ‘blind boxes’. Young people can hardly be blamed for spending more on smaller fun purchases when they know they’ll probably never get on the property ladder anyway – and anyone who thinks buying a weekly coffee is what’s preventing young people from buying a house is being unrealistic.

Furthermore, I think we may be blaming the wrong people here. Call me crazy, but I actually think if you work a full-time job, you should be able to afford rent, bills and buy ‘unnecessary’ treats. You shouldn’t have to be rich to be able to afford coffee on a hard day, a social life, spending money on drinks or dinner with friends, dates, a gym membership – the list goes on. And none of these things should be lumped in with ‘luxuries’ just because they aren’t essentials. They fall somewhere in-between: perhaps not strictly necessary to live, but necessary for your happiness, for your quality of life. The cost of living crisis has gotten so bad we seem to have normalised and internalised that it’s the individual’s responsibility to relentlessly save, that any money spent on treats is a ‘waste.’ But if you work a full-time job in a city, you shouldn’t be earning just enough money to live in that city, you should be earning enough to flourish in that city.

Resultingly, it can feel kind of depressing to be a young person today. Instead of leaving university feeling hopeful and excited to be out in the world starting the next chapter of our lives, many of us are instead dreading the prospect of post-university life. A mundane, underpaid job you aren’t passionate about almost feels inevitable. Owning property or paying off your student debt feels impossible. It’s easy to feel hopeless, and like there’s nothing you can do to change these circumstances, no amount of saving that will help. And ultimately part of the issue is young people feeling like these are their problems to solve. Thinking you can’t afford a house or to move out of home because you’re not saving effectively. Thinking you couldn’t get a graduate job because you didn’t spend enough time on your applications, because we’ve normalised applying to potentially hundreds of jobs without getting any, or employers receiving thousands of applications for one position. Young people can be smart about saving or working their hardest, but we don’t live in a meritocracy – there are some economic hurdles most people just can’t get past. This isn’t just the individual’s responsibility to fix – we need systemic change.