The summer months of June and July often see students happily graduating from Universities around the country; a proud moment for students and their families alike. This summer is somewhat different.  It is estimated that around 300 000 undergraduates are due to graduate in 2009, each with the burden of an average £15,700 debt.  Yet, according to a recent survey, only 36% of these graduates are due to secure a graduate job.  The statistics are grim, but the reality is much worse, for this leaves a generation of students who once held lofty ambitions of a professional career facing the prospect of being unable to secure a job at all, let alone the job for which they have studied. It is genuinely sad to think that so many young people who were encouraged to go to University will be filling unskilled, blue collar positions, which they would have been eligible for anyway, had they not gone to University and accrued a lifetime's worth of debt in the process. 
 
Yet worse, is the thought of all those young people, who once looked forward to graduating and securing a lucrative career, facing only the prospect of signing on for Jobseekers Allowance.  This is the first generation to pay top-up fees, this is also the generation for whom failure is uncommon; it is almost impossible to fail a GCSE or an A-Level - anyone who wants to go to University can do so.  Further still, this is the generation which will have to bridge the pensions-gap, financing the retirement of their elders whilst also shouldering an unprecedented tax-burden – a legacy of the corporate greed that bought the banking system to its knees.

Indeed, graduates tend to elicit little sympathy; they are seen as being authors of their own misfortune.  Stereotypically, they are people who solicited the student lifestyle rather than the academic pursuits which are congruent with a degree.  Accordingly they have over-spent; over-indulged, have under-worked and as such, their plight is of their own making.  Yet, whilst in some cases this may be true, it is not the customary, most students enrol at University to find enlightenment and ultimately to make themselves employable in their chosen profession - the social side being a extra dimension – a distraction from the thought of the friends and family you leave behind.

Moreover, the Government target of fifty percent of all sixth form leavers to attend University served as encouragement to do so. Raising aspirations is indeed a noble cause, yet sadly, this aspiration is simply untenable, precisely because of its nature; a saturation of people educated to degree level with a shrinking number of jobs that require such a qualification.  Yet the fallacy of the aim is multi-faceted, as by setting such a high target, the Government has lowered the threshold of what may be a University and who may be a student.  It has led to a malaise in standards – brighter students are forced to define themselves by continuing their education with Masters Degrees and PhDs – further increasing their personal debt in the process.

That said, a degree in mathematics is not required to comprehend that a weekly income of £50.95 is small change set against a deficit of £15,700. Yet the lasting legacy is one that cannot be quantified empirically; the sense of abject worthlessness, commensurate with having been to University, embracing the expectation of embarking on a career, only to realise that one cannot be found, simply being just another graduate, a statistic.  Such is the feeling of resentment, of betrayal and of embarrassment, one finds it hard to fully understand the feeling and harder still to have empathy, unless you've been there, but I know, for I belong, to the debt generation.