Nicholas Watt and Sam Jones The Guardian, Monday 13 October 2008 Article history
Controversial plans to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 42 days are likely to be rejected overwhelmingly by the House of Lords today, piling fresh pressure on Gordon Brown to abandon the proposal.
The strength of feeling among peers is highlighted today by Lord Goldsmith, Tony Blair's long-serving attorney general. In an article for the Guardian, Goldsmith writes: "This pernicious provision should be removed from this bill now. I regard it as not only unnecessary but also counterproductive; and we should fight to protect the liberties the terrorists would take from us, not destroy them ourselves. This proposal is wrong in principle and dangerous in practice."
Peers will today have their first chance to vote on the detention plan when the government's counterterrorism bill is debated at committee stage in the upper house. It is widely expected that peers will reject the measure in large numbers, with Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and cross-bench peers joining forces.
Rejection by the Lords would mean that Brown would have to muster a majority in the Commons for a series of new votes if he wants to see the measure passed into law. Peers are prepared for a lengthy session of parliamentary "ping pong", the process in which an amended bill is thrown back and forth from one chamber to another for repeated votes. If this ends in deadlock, Brown would have to wait a year before using the Parliament Act to force the measure through against the will of the Lords.
Campaigners against 42-day detention believe that Brown is not prepared for such a battle as he cannot guarantee another Commons majority. The measure was passed in the Commons in June by only nine votes after the nine Democratic Unionist MPs supported the government. Since then, the number of opposition MPs has increased by two. John Howell replaced Boris Johnson, who had already stood down as MP for Henley and therefore did not vote, and John Mason won Glasgow East for the SNP from Labour.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty, said: "We are all learning the lessons of abandoning ethics in the marketplace. But it is just as dangerous to abandon them in the fight against terrorism. We hope and believe that the Lords will reject the discredited plan and that in the spirit of national unity the government will then drop it."
The vote comes as 42 British writers come together to make plain their anger at the detention plans. Among those involved in the campaign, which is coordinated by Liberty, are Philip Pullman, Monica Ali, Julian Barnes, Ian Rankin, Alain de Botton, Ali Smith and AL Kennedy. Each has produced work attacking the legislation, which is published online at 42writers.com.
Showing posts with label UK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UK. Show all posts
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Wednesday, 14 January 2009
Young face crisis in hunt for work
Bea Carter, 21, is one of thousands of new graduates who are unemployed as 18-to 24-year-olds bear the brunt of the economic downturn Photograph: Christopher Thomond/GuardianThis year's graduates face the toughest battle in a generation for jobs, with tens of thousands facing unemployment, according to evidence documenting the impact of the economic downturn.
Ministers are so concerned that they are drawing up a rescue package to help the class of 2009 find a job or get new skills when they graduate this summer. The proposals, from the universities secretary John Denham's office, will target the 18-24 age group amid fears that a generation of young people will be scarred by recession. They include an internship scheme where students would work at a reduced wage to gain experience. Four firms - including Barclays and Microsoft - have agreed to take part in the scheme, which is being called the National Internship Scheme.
Denham told the Guardian: "This year there will be a large number of graduates - the children of the babyboomers - and we are keen to make sure that they get as good a chance as we can give them to get jobs and build good careers. We will not leave them to fend for themselves.
"The internship scheme will give them an opportunity to gain real experience of using their skills at work, and give them the best chance of showing employers what they can do."
David Blanchflower, the influential economist and member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee who predicted the recession, today warns in the Guardian of its impact on young people, describing the latest employment figures, which show 18-24-year-olds bearing the brunt of redundancies, as "scary".
He says: "We don't want these spells of unemployment to get long. A spell of unemployment is bad when young, and the longer it is, the worse it is. We want to do everything to prevent it becoming long-term unemployment."
Evidence of the extent of the downturn in graduate recruitment uncovered by the Guardian includes:
• Major companies have narrowed their search for graduates to five elite universities as they cut recruitment numbers.
• The organisers of the annual graduate recruitment "milk round" say jobs in finance and retail are drying up. Even where companies are recruiting, vacancies will not necessarily last until summer as the economic slump worsens.
• The management consultancy KPMG, seen as a recruitment barometer, says its 600 graduate entry jobs are nearly all taken months ahead of schedule as students scramble for the top jobs.
• Manchester University careers service, the largest outside London, has seen the number of recruitment adverts taken out with its careers service tail off drastically.
• Careers service managers have been inundated with desperate students who don't know what to do when they graduate because their plans are in tatters.
• The slump in graduate jobs threatens unemployment for people with lower or no qualifications as graduates turn their sights on non-graduate vacancies.
The most recent labour market survey shows unemployment growing fastest among 18-24-year-olds. Unemployment for young adults was 597,000 in the three months to October 2008, up 55,000 from the three months to July 2008. Three million people of all ages are predicted to be out of work by the end of the year; at least 40% (1.25 million) will be under 25.
Denham's plans for internships would see students gain experience with major employers - from the public sector and charities as well as business. Graduates would receive pay deals slightly above the current student grant of £2,835 to ensure they don't suffer a cut in income. The government is considering subsidising the placements to encourage employers to take part.
Carl Gilleard, chief executive of the Association of Graduate Recruiters, said: "For the class of 2009 it's going to be more difficult than they ever banked on." He urged graduates to consider taking lower-status, lower-paid jobs - including bar work or stacking shelves - rather than abandoning the search.
Malcolm Grant, provost of University College London and current chair of the Russell Group of 20 leading universities, said: "Firms are already narrowing their search to a small number of universities: Oxford, Cambridge, the LSE, UCL and Imperial, and I think that's a shame.
"In employment terms it's rational: it's an easier recruitment process if you have fewer jobs to fill. But it's an arbitrary decision and ... it will be overlooking a rich source of talent at other universities."
At Leeds University, careers advisers are warning students to apply now as vacancies are drying up. "Graduate positions are almost full now when normally they would still have vacancies to fill right through to the summer," said Bob Gilworth, head of the university's careers service. Other careers services said they were operating at full stretch. Elspeth Farrar, head of careers at Imperial College London, said they had been inundated with inquiries from worried students who had expected to go into banking or management consultancy but now felt that wasn't an option.
A poll from the Higher Education Careers Service Unit found 62% of this year's graduates were not confident that their degree would help them get a job.
Gordon Brown will host a jobs summit on Monday to look at the impact of the recession on jobs. The Conservatives yesterday announced proposals to help young people ride out the recession, including a database of alternative apprenticeships for apprentices who lose their jobs.
The crunch generation
They did everything right: studied hard, prettified their CVs with internships, and bounced out of university - only to find themselves the recession's first victims
Patrick Barkham and Polly Curtis
The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009
The bafflement in the voices of young graduates is like that of someone who is suddenly smacked in the face by a friend. Teachers, parents and most of all politicians told them a university education was the key to getting a good job. Careers advisers chivvied them to get work experience. So undergraduates dutifully studied for decent degrees, prettified their CVs with useful internships and bounced out of university last summer. The world, and the job market, was their oyster. And then: thud. They were floored by the sucker punch of recession.
A generation of young people - Generation Crunch, perhaps - is experiencing unemployment for the first time, a sinking, scarring sensation that completely escaped the generation above them. David Blanchflower, the influential economist and member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee who predicted the recession, believes that 3 million people will be out of work by the end of this year. Of these, more than 1 million are likely to be under 25. The latest labour market survey shows unemployment growing fastest among 18- to 24-year-olds: of the 137,000 rise in unemployment in the three months to October, 55,000, or 40%, were aged 18 to 24. "That scared me and everyone else," says Blanchflower. "A spell of unemployment when you're young has a very different effect than when you're older." Economists such as Blanchflower talk of "permanent scars" against "temporary blemishes": the evidence is that prolonged unemployment permanently damages the young.
Facing a youth unemployment crisis, Gordon Brown has already this week promised £140m to increase the number public and private apprentices by 35,000. It may be harder, however, to help jobless graduates. If the victims of earlier recessions were the millions of skilled manual workers, will bright young graduates bear the brunt of the latest economic crisis?
Last summer Bea Carter, 21, finished her English literature degree and decided to stay in Manchester with her university friends to "live together, like young professionals". She thought it would be fun. "But I'm even struggling to get a job I don't want, let alone one that I do." She settled for a job at a branch of Marks & Spencer's Simply Food. "Working in a supermarket wasn't really what I expected to be doing at all, but since I can't even get admin or office work, I had to take it." A week before M&S announced it was axing 1,200 jobs, Carter's contract came up for renewal. Her managers let it expire. Shocked, she tried registering at temping agencies but was told she couldn't because she didn't have administrative experience. "I always thought my degree would help me in the long-term with a career, but it certainly hasn't helped me with the first step. A lot of agencies don't care if you have a degree, they just want to know that you can type a certain number of words a minute," she says. "Right now, job-hunting for me is about money, not about a career."
Graduates being forced to take non-graduate jobs is not a new trend. The expansion of higher education, driven by the government's target to put 50% of young people into it, has happened too quickly for the labour market. "There are more graduates than ever and there are more graduates now in less vocational subjects from 'less prestigious' universities than there used to be. We have a much higher proportion of social science and arts graduates which is why a third or more of graduates don't get graduate jobs," says Prof Peter Dolton of Royal Holloway, University of London, and the London School of Economics's Centre for the Economics of Education. He says this trend will be exacerbated by the economic downturn. "When you have rising graduate unemployment, the effects are felt worst by graduates of non-vocational subjects and graduates from less prestigious universities. That's going to get even worse in recession."
The crunch on graduates began in earnest in September, according to Mike Hill of Graduate Prospects, the graduate careers service. "In August we were thinking 'things are going well'. By September we were thinking 'oh shit'. Immediate vacancies disappeared," he says. "Graduate recruiters might say they are going to be recruiting but what they mean is very many fewer than last year. Students aren't going to be as cocky."
If things are bad for the class of 2008, they will get worse for the classes of 2009 and 2010, according to Dolton, as traditional big graduate recruiters pull out of the "milk round". According to Graduate Prospects, these recruiters are changing, so while M&S may be laying off workers, Aldi, Asda and Netto are "very actively recruiting". The few openings at conventional recruiters are now desperately competitive: KPMG's 2009 graduate jobs are nearly all taken, months ahead of schedule, as students scramble for the top jobs.
Carl Gilleard, chief executive of the Association of Graduate Recruiters, suggests that young graduates should keep busy. "It's going to be a shock to the class of 2009. But it's far better to consider a temporary job than to sit at home and feel sorry for yourself. Why not do bar work? It involves skills you need for lots of jobs - working with people and perhaps negotiating tricky situations."
This is greeted with hollow laughter by many graduates and undergraduates, who are struggling to pick up the most menial of jobs, let alone something to burnish their CVs. In recent months, Stephen Greatley, 18, a student from Liverpool, has applied for more than 40 holiday jobs to help fund his Oxford University degree and has not found any work. "There was a job advertised at the Royal Mail. The job description warned it was tedious, repetitive work; I applied and didn't hear anything back," he says.
Oliver Brand, 21, graduated from Birmingham University last summer with a high 2:1 in political science. Since then, he has applied for more than 35 jobs and 75 unpaid work placements in advertising and marketing. "I wasn't cocky at uni but I had high hopes for myself," he says. "I was head boy at school, I thought I had quite a lot going for me. I'd always expected a bit of rejection but after the 100th, I thought 'Oh God, what's going on here?'
"I've even found bar work hard to come by now. They want people who can guarantee to work there for a year and I've been honest and said I hope to get a full-time job." As well as seeking work experience, he's joined local job agencies near his home in Somerset. The rewards for all this endeavour? Two weeks' work experience with a London marketing company and occasional cash-in-hand labouring for a neighbour.
It is "completely demoralising," he says. "My mates have found it exactly the same. We're all pretty down. We meet up regularly. All we are doing is trying to find a job every day."
As Blanchflower warns, this demoralising effect could turn into long-term "scarring" if this new generation of unemployed people are out of work for more than a year. There was a sizeable group among the young unemployed in the 1981 recession who were still out of work in their 40s. Studies show that young long-term unemployed people find it difficult to reconnect with stable career jobs. "It's important to get a foothold in the labour market," says Blanchflower. "If you don't get in, life becomes very hard."
Young graduates are hit by a "double whammy" according to David Willetts, the Conservative higher education spokesman: companies freeze recruitment and then there is the last in, first out principle. Recent graduates lucky enough to get work have found themselves turfed out as the recession bites.
Dirren Patel, 25, got a degree in business management from the University of Leicester and quickly picked up work for a City firm specialising in IT mergers and acquisitions. Since being made redundant in September, he has found it "impossible" to find similar work in the City. Living at home with his parents near Woking, Surrey, Patel has been able to take the long view: he is now looking for a graduate job that will start in September. He has 20 months' experience working in the City and he is competing against new graduates with none. He knows 30-year-olds who are applying for entry-level graduate jobs. He says new graduates have very little chance: "2:1s are not worth anything anymore because everyone's got them."
Blanchflower believes more education and training is vital for the young unemployed. But Richard Reeves, director of thinktank Demos, says the government's instinct seems to be to encourage well-qualified (and often heavily indebted) graduates to take on more study (and more debt). Reeves says a government minister recently told him unemployed graduates will probably end up doing master's degrees. "'Let them do master's degrees' is the modern equivalent of 'let them eat cake'," says Reeves. "You just worsen the problem. Doing an MA should not be an economic policy, it should be a broader social policy."
Reeves is not surprised graduates feel angry and betrayed when they have no job to show for years of study after obeying the urgings of the government. "The sell has always been 'go to higher education and you'll get a better job'. The sell should be higher education is a way to expand your horizons, discover more about the world and yourself and help you get a better life, as well as a job," he says. "This vocational assumption is being destruction-tested by the recession."
Have young people funnelled into the higher education factory been misled? "There is a growing debate about the 'return' of a university degree," says Willetts. "The conventional model has been supply for graduates and the number of graduates has risen in happy tandem. But if that falls out of sync then students will ask themselves whether it's all worthwhile."
According to Dolton, the government's target of getting 50% of adults into higher education was based on influential research looking at adult earnings over an entire career. Much of this studied generations born in 1958, and found each year in education over the age of 16 added 15% to earnings. But this, argues Dolton, was an exception: a uniquely privileged generation who enjoyed an elite education and a smooth labour market. To suggest modern degrees would add a similar value - called "rate of return to education" in academic circles - is "errant nonsense" he says. The government assumed further education would boost earnings by 8-15%. "Parents and kids have been sold a lie in the sense that the rate of return to education is not that," says Dolton.
What should be done? Skills minister John Denham is drawing up an action plan to tackle unemployment among 18- to 24-year-olds, which aims to help thousands of graduates. The government needs to act quickly, says Blanchflower. "We don't want these spells of unemployment to get long. A spell of unemployment is bad when young and the longer it is, the worse it is. We want to do everything to prevent it becoming long-term unemployment."
Reeves warns it may prove harder to assist graduates. Keynesian-style public works - generating jobs through public sector infrastructure projects - are ill-suited to most graduates because skills sets do not match. "Would you want someone with a degree in media studies to lag your loft? I wouldn't," says Reeves. If the government wants to create new graduate jobs, it could invest in cultural and creative industries, suggests Reeves, which should be seen as part of the country's infrastructure and as something which would reap profits and economic growth in the future.
If things are tough for young graduates, however, they will only get tougher for less skilled young people. "So far, it looks as if it's the unskilled who are suffering the most. In the short and long term being unskilled is much worse than being skilled," says Reeves. Paul Gregg, a professor of economics at Bristol University, predicts that the number of unemployed graduates will rise "and the length of time it takes them to connect with the labour market will lengthen but they will get in, although with lower wages than in the past."
In other words, graduates will lower their sights and end up taking the jobs of less skilled workers. "Graduates are very mobile. They are more likely to move around to find work," says Ian Brinkley, associate director of the Work Foundation. "For a while at least it's going to look a lot less attractive to go to university. But a degree will still help you get a job if not a well-paid job - and that takes that job away from someone else."
Additional reporting by Huma Qureshi
Patrick Barkham and Polly Curtis
The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009
The bafflement in the voices of young graduates is like that of someone who is suddenly smacked in the face by a friend. Teachers, parents and most of all politicians told them a university education was the key to getting a good job. Careers advisers chivvied them to get work experience. So undergraduates dutifully studied for decent degrees, prettified their CVs with useful internships and bounced out of university last summer. The world, and the job market, was their oyster. And then: thud. They were floored by the sucker punch of recession.
A generation of young people - Generation Crunch, perhaps - is experiencing unemployment for the first time, a sinking, scarring sensation that completely escaped the generation above them. David Blanchflower, the influential economist and member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee who predicted the recession, believes that 3 million people will be out of work by the end of this year. Of these, more than 1 million are likely to be under 25. The latest labour market survey shows unemployment growing fastest among 18- to 24-year-olds: of the 137,000 rise in unemployment in the three months to October, 55,000, or 40%, were aged 18 to 24. "That scared me and everyone else," says Blanchflower. "A spell of unemployment when you're young has a very different effect than when you're older." Economists such as Blanchflower talk of "permanent scars" against "temporary blemishes": the evidence is that prolonged unemployment permanently damages the young.
Facing a youth unemployment crisis, Gordon Brown has already this week promised £140m to increase the number public and private apprentices by 35,000. It may be harder, however, to help jobless graduates. If the victims of earlier recessions were the millions of skilled manual workers, will bright young graduates bear the brunt of the latest economic crisis?
Last summer Bea Carter, 21, finished her English literature degree and decided to stay in Manchester with her university friends to "live together, like young professionals". She thought it would be fun. "But I'm even struggling to get a job I don't want, let alone one that I do." She settled for a job at a branch of Marks & Spencer's Simply Food. "Working in a supermarket wasn't really what I expected to be doing at all, but since I can't even get admin or office work, I had to take it." A week before M&S announced it was axing 1,200 jobs, Carter's contract came up for renewal. Her managers let it expire. Shocked, she tried registering at temping agencies but was told she couldn't because she didn't have administrative experience. "I always thought my degree would help me in the long-term with a career, but it certainly hasn't helped me with the first step. A lot of agencies don't care if you have a degree, they just want to know that you can type a certain number of words a minute," she says. "Right now, job-hunting for me is about money, not about a career."
Graduates being forced to take non-graduate jobs is not a new trend. The expansion of higher education, driven by the government's target to put 50% of young people into it, has happened too quickly for the labour market. "There are more graduates than ever and there are more graduates now in less vocational subjects from 'less prestigious' universities than there used to be. We have a much higher proportion of social science and arts graduates which is why a third or more of graduates don't get graduate jobs," says Prof Peter Dolton of Royal Holloway, University of London, and the London School of Economics's Centre for the Economics of Education. He says this trend will be exacerbated by the economic downturn. "When you have rising graduate unemployment, the effects are felt worst by graduates of non-vocational subjects and graduates from less prestigious universities. That's going to get even worse in recession."
The crunch on graduates began in earnest in September, according to Mike Hill of Graduate Prospects, the graduate careers service. "In August we were thinking 'things are going well'. By September we were thinking 'oh shit'. Immediate vacancies disappeared," he says. "Graduate recruiters might say they are going to be recruiting but what they mean is very many fewer than last year. Students aren't going to be as cocky."
If things are bad for the class of 2008, they will get worse for the classes of 2009 and 2010, according to Dolton, as traditional big graduate recruiters pull out of the "milk round". According to Graduate Prospects, these recruiters are changing, so while M&S may be laying off workers, Aldi, Asda and Netto are "very actively recruiting". The few openings at conventional recruiters are now desperately competitive: KPMG's 2009 graduate jobs are nearly all taken, months ahead of schedule, as students scramble for the top jobs.
Carl Gilleard, chief executive of the Association of Graduate Recruiters, suggests that young graduates should keep busy. "It's going to be a shock to the class of 2009. But it's far better to consider a temporary job than to sit at home and feel sorry for yourself. Why not do bar work? It involves skills you need for lots of jobs - working with people and perhaps negotiating tricky situations."
This is greeted with hollow laughter by many graduates and undergraduates, who are struggling to pick up the most menial of jobs, let alone something to burnish their CVs. In recent months, Stephen Greatley, 18, a student from Liverpool, has applied for more than 40 holiday jobs to help fund his Oxford University degree and has not found any work. "There was a job advertised at the Royal Mail. The job description warned it was tedious, repetitive work; I applied and didn't hear anything back," he says.
Oliver Brand, 21, graduated from Birmingham University last summer with a high 2:1 in political science. Since then, he has applied for more than 35 jobs and 75 unpaid work placements in advertising and marketing. "I wasn't cocky at uni but I had high hopes for myself," he says. "I was head boy at school, I thought I had quite a lot going for me. I'd always expected a bit of rejection but after the 100th, I thought 'Oh God, what's going on here?'
"I've even found bar work hard to come by now. They want people who can guarantee to work there for a year and I've been honest and said I hope to get a full-time job." As well as seeking work experience, he's joined local job agencies near his home in Somerset. The rewards for all this endeavour? Two weeks' work experience with a London marketing company and occasional cash-in-hand labouring for a neighbour.
It is "completely demoralising," he says. "My mates have found it exactly the same. We're all pretty down. We meet up regularly. All we are doing is trying to find a job every day."
As Blanchflower warns, this demoralising effect could turn into long-term "scarring" if this new generation of unemployed people are out of work for more than a year. There was a sizeable group among the young unemployed in the 1981 recession who were still out of work in their 40s. Studies show that young long-term unemployed people find it difficult to reconnect with stable career jobs. "It's important to get a foothold in the labour market," says Blanchflower. "If you don't get in, life becomes very hard."
Young graduates are hit by a "double whammy" according to David Willetts, the Conservative higher education spokesman: companies freeze recruitment and then there is the last in, first out principle. Recent graduates lucky enough to get work have found themselves turfed out as the recession bites.
Dirren Patel, 25, got a degree in business management from the University of Leicester and quickly picked up work for a City firm specialising in IT mergers and acquisitions. Since being made redundant in September, he has found it "impossible" to find similar work in the City. Living at home with his parents near Woking, Surrey, Patel has been able to take the long view: he is now looking for a graduate job that will start in September. He has 20 months' experience working in the City and he is competing against new graduates with none. He knows 30-year-olds who are applying for entry-level graduate jobs. He says new graduates have very little chance: "2:1s are not worth anything anymore because everyone's got them."
Blanchflower believes more education and training is vital for the young unemployed. But Richard Reeves, director of thinktank Demos, says the government's instinct seems to be to encourage well-qualified (and often heavily indebted) graduates to take on more study (and more debt). Reeves says a government minister recently told him unemployed graduates will probably end up doing master's degrees. "'Let them do master's degrees' is the modern equivalent of 'let them eat cake'," says Reeves. "You just worsen the problem. Doing an MA should not be an economic policy, it should be a broader social policy."
Reeves is not surprised graduates feel angry and betrayed when they have no job to show for years of study after obeying the urgings of the government. "The sell has always been 'go to higher education and you'll get a better job'. The sell should be higher education is a way to expand your horizons, discover more about the world and yourself and help you get a better life, as well as a job," he says. "This vocational assumption is being destruction-tested by the recession."
Have young people funnelled into the higher education factory been misled? "There is a growing debate about the 'return' of a university degree," says Willetts. "The conventional model has been supply for graduates and the number of graduates has risen in happy tandem. But if that falls out of sync then students will ask themselves whether it's all worthwhile."
According to Dolton, the government's target of getting 50% of adults into higher education was based on influential research looking at adult earnings over an entire career. Much of this studied generations born in 1958, and found each year in education over the age of 16 added 15% to earnings. But this, argues Dolton, was an exception: a uniquely privileged generation who enjoyed an elite education and a smooth labour market. To suggest modern degrees would add a similar value - called "rate of return to education" in academic circles - is "errant nonsense" he says. The government assumed further education would boost earnings by 8-15%. "Parents and kids have been sold a lie in the sense that the rate of return to education is not that," says Dolton.
What should be done? Skills minister John Denham is drawing up an action plan to tackle unemployment among 18- to 24-year-olds, which aims to help thousands of graduates. The government needs to act quickly, says Blanchflower. "We don't want these spells of unemployment to get long. A spell of unemployment is bad when young and the longer it is, the worse it is. We want to do everything to prevent it becoming long-term unemployment."
Reeves warns it may prove harder to assist graduates. Keynesian-style public works - generating jobs through public sector infrastructure projects - are ill-suited to most graduates because skills sets do not match. "Would you want someone with a degree in media studies to lag your loft? I wouldn't," says Reeves. If the government wants to create new graduate jobs, it could invest in cultural and creative industries, suggests Reeves, which should be seen as part of the country's infrastructure and as something which would reap profits and economic growth in the future.
If things are tough for young graduates, however, they will only get tougher for less skilled young people. "So far, it looks as if it's the unskilled who are suffering the most. In the short and long term being unskilled is much worse than being skilled," says Reeves. Paul Gregg, a professor of economics at Bristol University, predicts that the number of unemployed graduates will rise "and the length of time it takes them to connect with the labour market will lengthen but they will get in, although with lower wages than in the past."
In other words, graduates will lower their sights and end up taking the jobs of less skilled workers. "Graduates are very mobile. They are more likely to move around to find work," says Ian Brinkley, associate director of the Work Foundation. "For a while at least it's going to look a lot less attractive to go to university. But a degree will still help you get a job if not a well-paid job - and that takes that job away from someone else."
Additional reporting by Huma Qureshi
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