The news arrives with the solemnity of a royal decree: top university degrees have been revealed for lifetime earnings, and UK graduate premiums have been confirmed. How reassuring. How perfectly British.
We like our hierarchies clearly delineated, our ambitions neatly packaged in mortarboards. But let us not mistake correlation for causation. The truth is far more uncomfortable.
We have constructed a vast system of tertiary education that functions primarily as a sorting mechanism, a multi-year hazing ritual that signals obedience rather than intellect. The premium earned by graduates of Oxbridge and Russell Group institutions is not a testament to superior learning. It is a class marker, a caste badge.
Study any university curriculum and you will find it bloated with theory, divorced from practical reality, and increasingly irrelevant to the world of work. Meanwhile, the trades wither. The apprenticeships vanish.
We produce armies of indebted young people who can deconstruct a poem but cannot wire a plug. The Roman Empire fell, in part, because its elite lost touch with the practical arts. Sound familiar?
The real scandal is not that some degrees pay more. It is that we have convinced a generation that a degree is the only path to a meaningful life. That is the lie.
And it is a lie that will cost us dearly.
