Graduates on benefits claiming too sick to work

Grandmabatty

The trouble nowadays about getting off your arse and not running home to mummy is the lack of affordable housing, even rubbish places.

"Running home to mummy", although a horrid phrase, does not mean they cannot work to support themselves, and perhaps learn to pay a small share of household bills. My daughters supported both this way, strangely though, even through A levels Tesco / MacDonalds was the choice of job for two, the other an engineering apprenticeship. All supported by "mum and dad", but all paying a little towards the bills, called learning responsibilities. Now two are in their own homes, one qualified, the other graduates this year, the other now working full time in a well known shop, until his apprenticeship starts. Perhaps these benefit claimers are too lazy. Stressful, they know nothing, and it's too easy to claim benefits for that, rather than lack of work causes more problems.

CariadAgain

Fallingstar

As an erstwhile teacher I would recommend more vocational courses that are not viewed as ‘second best’ to academic courses, and bring back the tech colleges and polytechnics. Youngsters who don’t want to study Shakespeare from year 10 should be able to opt out of academic studies to study vocational subjects, is frustrating for pupils to have to study subjects they are not good at and feel frustrated with. Plumbers, electricians, mechanical engineers, roofers, hairdressers, and construction engineering etc., are well paid jobs that youngsters need and this country needs.

Absolutely agree!

There was a time where - if I'd wanted children - then I would have assumed/expected they'd go to University. But - that was then (ie when I think it was only 5% that went there). So I'd have had visions of them coming out with a professional job, making a group of friends/contacts, maybe meeting a spouse.

These days - when I think it's 50% that are going - I would take quite the reverse view and be scanning for what tradespeople jobs they might be able to train for instead (there wouldnt be the possible spouses/contacts) - but they should be much surer of a job come the end of it and on the terms they decided to have. Probably rather a well-paid one at that. Years back now the regular plumber I had in my last house told me what sort of money he was earning!!! - and he wasnt overcharging either and he said he could earn even more if that was his priority and he put his mind to it - but he felt he was doing okay as he was.

Add in these are a type of job rather less likely to be replaced by AI and it makes sense to me.

House of Commons Library
"The higher education entry rate among UK 18-year-olds increased from 24.7% in 2006 to 30.7% in 2015 and peaked at 38.2% in 2021. It fell back to 36.3% in 2025."
Obviously not all complete their degrees

*David49 Mon 26-Jan-26 08:35:09

After being encouraged by teachers to take the university route no wonder so many are suffering mental health problems.*

Sorry, OP, but where is the evidence to support your entirely incorrect allegation that it is teachers' encouragement that is behind this issue? In my 47 years of teaching, I found it was PARENTS who had to keep up with the Joneses by boasting of a university student/graduate in the family.

I've already asked that, but no reply. To be fair, I think many (if not most) parents want the best for their children. There is no evidence I am aware of that suggests that they want them to get an education in order to 'keep up with the Joneses' either.

Why do so few seem to credit young people with the ability to think for themselves?

Well said Fallingstar Learning a trade is the way to go. AI will be taking over many jobs in the future but it won't be any good at rewiring, unblocking a loo or plastering.

Doodle, I assure you that despite the dumbing down of degrees, there is still a cachet attached to having a "family graduate". Especially if it's the first member of the family to go to uni.

Doodledog my husband was a university lecturer and said that for quite a number of years (15/20 maybe) the number of students coming to open days with their parents^ has been growing year on year. In the 70s nobody came with parents to open days and now almost nobody comes without them.

He was heartily sick of the parents monopolising the conversation and said he repeatedly had to ask the prospective student what they thought.
He was fed up with parents saying "he thinks" or "she wants to".

In latter years he'd resorted to saying "maybe you would like to consider this degree Mr X?
🙄

My Grandson got good GCSE's, he did not want to do A levels. He is 20 now, got good qualifications in hydraulic engineering. He started the company at 16 after leaving school
He wanted to further his career and is working for a huge company and doing further exams. In three to four years He will be on a massive salary should he choose to stay. He will be saddled with no debt, and will not worry about not getting a job.
I honestly think some degrees are have very poor job prospects, my daughters friend did a degree and the field she wanted to go in had very few jobs and thousands of students studying this.
My daughter has a masters, she has a job in the field she studied and she earned well.

BoadiceaJones

*David49 Mon 26-Jan-26 08:35:09

After being encouraged by teachers to take the university route no wonder so many are suffering mental health problems.*

Sorry, OP, but where is the evidence to support your entirely incorrect allegation that it is teachers' encouragement that is behind this issue? In my 47 years of teaching, I found it was PARENTS who had to keep up with the Joneses by boasting of a university student/graduate in the family.

In their early 20s when graduating the vast majority will be physically fit young people, it was my conclusion that depression was the cause of being unfit for work.

Honestly if I had been encouraged to go to Uni, most teachers do encourage students to do that, found no job prospects at all, I would be depressed.

It seems there are just too many courses and too many unis now. Do you really need a degree for things like photography, car body maintenance and gardening ? I think a lot of it is about money on the part of the universities . A lot of the good ones help the students into employment through industrial placements but a lot of not so good ones don’t. All my children and all my grandchildren who are old enough have attended or are attending university courses. Some get a job connected with their studies, some not but all of them have debts to pay, especially the medico who owes tens of thousands. Very depressing if they don’t find employment.

BoadiceaJones

Doodle, I assure you that despite the dumbing down of degrees, there is still a cachet attached to having a "family graduate". Especially if it's the first member of the family to go to uni.

Yep....my erstwhile sister-in-law's FB page contains precisely two things now - as she's censored everything else off. Those things are a photo of her favourite son getting a "degree" and one of her favourite son getting married recently.

His "degree" was in sports management as I recall!!! That made my father livid - as he was more than intelligent enough to go to a genuine university for a genuine degree - but couldnt (because of having been born into a large poor family in the 1930s). I could see just how upset he was to miss out on his degree he genuinely could have got - due to no fault of his own - and then to see one of his grandsons getting one of these so-called ones and flaunting it like it was a real one. Added insult to injury basically....even though he was a typical doting grandparent.

There was no cachet involved at all to that "degree" in the eyes of either my father or myself. But I could see my mother thought there was and I would imagine some of their friends think there is.

Why so scathing about sports management. ?My grandson did sports science with English degree at Loughborough . He needed 3 A grades to get on the course.He went on to get a PGCE and a masters in education.Of course the degree in Sports management is a real degree and I am sure there are many careers leading from it. Why can't you celebrate your nephew's achievement? I think employers are also keen to use what skills have been learnt at university .It isn't just about the subject.

Sarnia

Well said Fallingstar Learning a trade is the way to go. AI will be taking over many jobs in the future but it won't be any good at rewiring, unblocking a loo or plastering.

Exactly so!

My father was very farsighted - ie he'd think decades ahead and do what he could accordingly. Cue for my erstwhile brother emerging from school and my father got him to apply for an engineering apprenticeship and got lucky that it was a telephone interview for some reason. Cue for my father (with his very similar voice) pretending to be my brother on the phone and "passing the interview" - whoops!!! So my brother took the apprenticeship that he'd got under false pretences - and got sacked within days for not being up to it. His 80 IQ meant his job opportunities were severely limited and basically he was a driver in various contexts and early retired on ill health grounds years before his time.

But - point being - my father could see all those years ahead and hence why he tried to get him an apprenticeship in a manual trade like that - ie so that he stood a chance of having a job until retirement age (that when my brothers retirement age would have been 65 and so he would have safely reached it around 2015 - before AI turned up....but my father was already awaiting its invention expectantly.

He was more direct with me - and the early 1980's saw him lecturing me on "Secretarial work - secretarial work!!!!!! You are capable of university - why on earth did you listen to your mother your fool? That type of job is unlikely to last you until retirement!!!" He was right - basically it didnt....and I had to cling onto the "shreds" of what office work I could get until happy release at 60, followed by job pension is based on pathetic pay.

Object lesson from my own experience being = the government can (and will) sit there watching whole swathes of types of jobs vanishing and they DO NOT CARE. They won't do anything. There won't be big retraining programmes + the government matching the income you're on already until you come out the other side trained in something else instead. The ball is thrown straight in your court, you sit there saying "How does the mortgage get paid whilst I'm retraining? and, of course, the money needed to live on" and there's a big fat silence...as they surreptitiously nip out the nearest door and shut it to behind them.

I've been saying for years "When this AI thing gets going = that will be an absolute swathe of remaining middle class jobs going all at once....and then what? I can assure you the government will do a big fat nowt about it".

NotSpaghetti

Doodledog my husband was a university lecturer and said that for quite a number of years (15/20 maybe) the number of students coming to open days with their parents^ has been growing year on year. In the 70s nobody came with parents to open days and now almost nobody comes without them.

He was heartily sick of the parents monopolising the conversation and said he repeatedly had to ask the prospective student what they thought.
He was fed up with parents saying "he thinks" or "she wants to".

In latter years he'd resorted to saying "maybe you would like to consider this degree Mr X?
🙄

Yes, I was a university lecturer too, and had exactly that experience. Parents thinking they are paying for the degree (even high fees are just a contribution, but that's another conversation) and sometimes seeming to be showing off by asking questions that they thought would catch staff out. To be fair, I saw the same sort of thing at school parents' evenings with my children, and heard parents gloating at how they'd got one over on Mr X. I don't understand that mentality - it's very unpleasant behaviour. As a retiree, I often hear people saying things about universities that are entirely untrue - usually based on third-hand or misunderstood things that their children or grandchildren have told them. Not lies, but certainly not the truth. If the grandparents went to university themselves it would have been decades ago, and even then, they'd have experience of one course at one university, which with the best will in the world is limited.

I'm not disputing that proud parents are a thing - one of the best bits of my job was seeing them at graduation ceremonies . I am, however, disputing unevidenced claims that students go to university because teachers and parents somehow push them into it and not because they want to go. I also dispute the idea that degrees are 'dumbed down' - particularly when the accusations have absolutely no statistics to back them up. 'I can assure you' is not evidence.

This thread has perhaps inevitably gone down the usual road of 'there are too many graduates', so has got a bit pointless, IMO.

We've had our day, and made our choices, and should, IMO, let new generations make their own. It comes across to me that there are those who may wish they'd made different choices, those whose choices were more limited than is usual today, and those who just don't value education for itself, and see it as simply training for working with 'technical skills'. All of those people appear to resent the fact that young people are likely to be better qualified than they are, so drag down their achievements by saying their qualifications are less worthy, that their skills are irrelevant and so on. It's human nature, maybe, but so dispiriting for the young people on the receiving end.

A degree is no longer a guarantee of a professional or managerial job for life. As I've said, I think that's perfectly fair. More people have them, so their scarcity value is lowered. But the upside of that is that fewer people are written off or expected to spend years doing night classes or day release whilst being paid lower salaries. There are only so many 'top' jobs, so ensuring they go to the best people makes sense. I dare say that for small employers it is cheaper to have talented young people working for a pittance and using their own time to get better at their jobs in the hope of being able to compete with the 5% who had a degree; but IMO it is much fairer for 35% of workers to be graduates and have to compete to get to the top. I think that FE and other ways for people to change direction or come to education late for whatever reason should be there too, incidentally. I don't see it as something that people should fit in between 5 and 18 with no chance to change their minds, develop new interests or be otherwise limited. I really wish it were cheaper to do all of that, but would support everyone having an individual education budget that they could spend over their lives, and pay for anything outside of that.

If people still believe that education is a waste of time and only technical skills matter, there is nothing I can say, other than that they are missing out on a lot. Anyway, it's not as though anyone is being forced to go to university, so if other people want to learn more about a subject that interests them, develop skills in all sorts of other areas, learn to be independent (maybe even more important if they have the helicopter parents described above), then why try to diminish that?

westendgirl

Why so scathing about sports management. ?My grandson did sports science with English degree at Loughborough . He needed 3 A grades to get on the course.He went on to get a PGCE and a masters in education.Of course the degree in Sports management is a real degree and I am sure there are many careers leading from it. Why can't you celebrate your nephew's achievement? I think employers are also keen to use what skills have been learnt at university .It isn't just about the subject.

Take no notice, westendgirl. The green-eyed monster has reared its head again, I fear. Sports science is a competitive subject (no pun intended!) and anyone who knows anything about universities would be aware of that. Having a degree or not has nothing to do with 'fault' or lack of it - it has to do with opportunity, yes, but also application, hard work and subject knowledge. There is no moral element.

Also, sport is likely to be one of the areas less likely to be affected by AI, so those who believe in education as training for a lifetime of work should be in favour, surely?

Congratulations to your grandson.

BoadiceaJones

*David49 Mon 26-Jan-26 08:35:09

After being encouraged by teachers to take the university route no wonder so many are suffering mental health problems.*

Sorry, OP, but where is the evidence to support your entirely incorrect allegation that it is teachers' encouragement that is behind this issue? In my 47 years of teaching, I found it was PARENTS who had to keep up with the Joneses by boasting of a university student/graduate in the family.

I certainly know of one such family. The daughter was pressured into going to a local uni, very low ranking - IIRC she got in with GCSEs and an NVQ.

She couldn’t cope, left after one term, and the following year was again pressured, to go to a different but similar rated university.
And again, she left after one term.
All because her mother had to keep her end up with relatives close by, whose daughters were more academically able.

Can I ask how you know that this happened because of the mother's ambitions, and also how you know that her reasons were based on keeping up with relatives?

I assume she didn't go about telling people that her daughter was going to university because her cousins were more able and she (the mother) wanted to 'keep her end up'?

Incidentally, it is most unlikely that a young person would get in with GCSEs or other Level 2 qualifications. 'An NVQ' was probably a BTEC, which is Level 3 (same as A level) and with distinctions is counted as equivalent to 3.5 A levels. I can't remember the number of points, but it can, and often is, as acceptable as A levels when it comes to applications. higher grade BTECs equate to A*s at A level - they are not inferior qualifications, although they tend to be in skills-based subjects as opposed to 'academic' ones. Again, the sorts of things that lead more directly into jobs.

Obviously I may be wrong, but this is coming across as the sort of misinformation I was referring to above.

westendgirl

Why so scathing about sports management. ?My grandson did sports science with English degree at Loughborough . He needed 3 A grades to get on the course.He went on to get a PGCE and a masters in education.Of course the degree in Sports management is a real degree and I am sure there are many careers leading from it. Why can't you celebrate your nephew's achievement? I think employers are also keen to use what skills have been learnt at university .It isn't just about the subject.

I've no idea why anyone should be scathing about a Sports Science degree!

DS thought of doing this, sports of all kinds were his
passion but in the end he did decide to take a different degree after taking a couple of years between school and university, travelling and working.

Sports Science can lead to many interesting careers.

His 80 IQ meant his job opportunities were severely limited

Was your brother's IQ tested by an Educational Psychologist? How do you know?

David, you obviously have a problem with universities and teachers as you are blaming both for depression in young people and failure to work. I suggest you seek help for this from people who are probably university educated.

Tony Blair conned youngsters to go to university to massage the youth unemployment figures. Most entry level jobs now demand a degree when 30 years ago a handful of GCE’s would suffice.

I love reading everyone's point of view on Gransnet, and I see that people contribute from diverse locations although that is not always explicit.
It would be interesting to know where everyone is in the world.
I am in Doncaster, UK by the way.

LOUISA1523

Even a degree leading to a profession does not guarantee work ....no nursing jobs going for graduates these days

Nothing new there. My 2 cousins , now in their 70's and GD 40. and niece were told that there were no jobs at the end of their training.

18 year olds who leave home for the first time to go to a university many many miles from home do struggle with their mental and physical health. We read of many cases at inquests and investigations and their problems are frequently overlooked by unqualified or poorly trained university staff. If those same students complete their degrees perhaps they don’t complete their healing and put on a front to those at home, and so this gets overlooked again. It builds and builds until breaking point. So many students are in this place and then start one job after another and can’t cope.
I’m not in that position fortunately as I went to university as a mature student and married with children but I saw and see many former students who now are lost. It’s so sad. So for the person who wondered how someone can go from university to never doing a day’s work and then be sick I say how do you know they haven’t tried to work. How many have fallen into zero hours contracts and then be fired, and so on. It’s a hard place to live and harder still if your employer doesn’t have a clue about mental health illnesses and how so many graduates have learned the art of masking.

Urging pupils to go to university helps governments keep the unemployment figures down. This is hard on lots of students who can’t get the jobs they’ve studied for. Also some people have no intentions of working. It’s so easy for them to claim mental health issues these days. It’s not fair on working people but they don’t care. There’s so much wrong in this country and it’s getting worse. More apprenticeships please.