Why the graduate jobs crisis demands urgent action

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This blog was kindly authored by Ava Doherty, an undergraduate at the University of Oxford.

Following reports that 2024 and 2025 mark the worst years for UK graduates entering the job market, it’s time to address why this crisis is deepening and what policymakers must do about it.

My generation was sold a simple promise: work hard, earn a degree from a ‘good university’, and employment would follow. Instead, we face a perfect storm that policymakers have largely ignored.

The graduate employment crisis stems from two converging factors. First, graduate job vacancies fell by 14.6% in 2024, the biggest drop since the 2008 financial crash, with over 6,000 planned roles scrapped. Secondly, there’s a fundamental mismatch between what employers claim to want and what they actually hire for.

The competition is staggering: 1.2 million applications were submitted for just 17,000 UK graduate roles in 2023/2024. Employers advertise ‘entry-level’ positions that require 5 years of executive assistant experience, an impossibility for recent graduates. This creates a perverse situation where 29-year-olds compete with 21-year-olds for the same roles, artificially inflating demand and pushing genuine graduates out of the market.

Journalism provides a stark example. When The Independent closed its print edition in 2016, around 100 of 160 journalists lost their jobs. Across the sector, internship opportunities have evaporated as newsrooms shrink and remaining staff lack the capacity to supervise graduates.

Many roles remain unfilled not because of labour shortages, but because applicants lack the specific, job-ready expertise employers now demand. For example, even entry-level administrative roles routinely require prior office experience and familiarity with multiple software packages, from Excel to Adobe tools, leaving graduates trapped in a catch-22 where experience is required to obtain the very first opportunity. This represents a clear market failure rather than an individual one.

A targeted policy response would be to embed cost-effective, accredited internships within universities. Rather than assuming spare capacity exists for reallocation, a false premise given the extensive efficiencies already made in the sector. This would require modest but ring-fenced investment from central government, modelled on existing apprenticeship levy structures. The cost would be offset by reduced graduate underemployment and its downstream effects on public services.

In the current constrained fiscal environment, this approach offers strong value for money by reducing graduate underemployment, easing skills shortages, and improving productivity without requiring significant new spending from higher education institutions. Framed as an investment in workforce readiness rather than a new entitlement, such a scheme would help align higher education with labour market needs while making more efficient use of limited public resources. 

Beyond the immediate crisis, structural digital exclusion compounds the problem for the most vulnerable graduates. Therefore, the following suggestions would give students practical experience during their degrees rather than after. Medium-term reforms should address digital accessibility. Government job portals remain bureaucratically complex, excluding neurodivergent applicants who struggle with poorly designed interfaces. Website improvements needn’t cost millions. Indeed, involving students in this redesign would yield better outcomes and valuable experience.

Long-term policy requires a fundamental shift in how we view graduate talent. When trusted with meaningful responsibility, young people deliver. Yet risk-averse hiring practices consistently favour ‘safe’ candidates over promising graduates.

UK policy prioritises an ageing population over young talent. Students struggle to access housing while infrastructure caters to older demographics. Perhaps it’s time to reconsider digital nomad arrangements. We could learn from the UK’s recent decision to rejoin Erasmus+ from 2027, though this comes too late for many current students.

This isn’t about abandoning older generations; it’s about recognising that sustainable economic policy requires investing in those who will drive future growth. Businesses that cater exclusively to over-55 consumers may protect short-term profits, but they court long-term obsolescence. A clear example is the high-street newspaper and magazine retail model, which optimised around older consumers by prioritising print distribution, in-store loyalty habits, and early-morning physical retail while deliberately underinvesting in digital platforms to avoid alienating an ageing customer base. As that generation declined, younger consumers, shaped by mobile news, social media, and on-demand content, did not inherit those habits, causing demand to collapse faster than firms could adapt. 

Compounding this, decision-making within these businesses remained dominated by the same older cohorts they served, leaving few younger employees with the authority to reshape products, pricing, or distribution to align with digital-first access, subscription models, and new consumption norms. By the time the structural nature of the shift became undeniable, these firms were locked into legacy cost structures and cultural assumptions, turning generational change into business failure rather than managed transition.

Students stand at the cutting edge of adapting to AI-disrupted markets. While the journalism and legal sectors face the automation of entry-level tasks, young people are developing synthesis strategies that blend AI and traditional methods. Yet how many recruiters attend university conferences where students present these innovations? For example, student journalists are already using large language models to analyse datasets, draft initial copy, and identify investigative leads, while applying traditional editorial judgement to fact-check, interview sources, and ensure legal compliance. These hybrid workflows perhaps offer a template for some media outlets, yet they remain largely invisible to employers because they emerge in academic settings rather than formal workplaces.

The proportion of UK graduates in full-time employment fell to 59% for those finishing in 2022/3, down from the previous year of 61%. With these key statistics in mind and rising graduate concerns, the Chancellor faces mounting pressure but appears to lack solutions. Without intervention, we risk losing a generation’s potential to emigration, underemployment, or disillusionment with higher education itself.

The policy recommendations I’ve outlined are actionable. They’re pragmatic responses to a quantifiable crisis. Subsidised internships, accessible job platforms, trust in graduate capability, and long-term workforce planning represent achievable goals that would benefit students, businesses, and the broader economy. The question is whether policymakers will act before the situation deteriorates further.