Degrees of Deception: What are we really selling young people?

We sell young people the dream that a degree guarantees success. In reality, the job market can’t deliver on the promise – and universities know it.

What, exactly, is university for?

That should be a simple question, but it’s one that keeps nagging at me. Ask most young people applying today, and the answer is obvious: it’s for getting a job. That’s the bargain. You pile up debt, spend years studying, and in exchange, you’re supposed to get access to careers and security you couldn’t otherwise have.

The problem? It’s a lie. I know, because I fell for it myself.

I did everything right. I got not one degree but two – law and international political theory. I specialised, I pushed, I built up those credentials we’re told are the keys to adulthood. And then? Nothing. Months of fruitless job applications. A year of being even more broke than the five years prior and demoralised before finally stumbling into work with Common Weal. Meanwhile, friends who went straight into apprenticeships or straight to work were quietly buying houses, going on holidays, and living lives that felt impossible for me.

It wasn’t just that I had no job. It was that I had debt, a CV full of ‘specialist’ knowledge that employers shrugged at, and a sense that I’d been conned.

People outside Scotland often assume our system is debt-free because tuition is covered. But most of us still leave university thousands of pounds in the red. The loans aren’t for lectures or libraries – they’re for rent, heating and food. You borrow just to exist while you study, usually in overpriced accommodation.

The whole system is built on a contradiction.

Universities have become, in many ways, a kind of Ponzi scheme. They are vast property owners with huge estates and overheads that have to be maintained. To keep the lights on, they need more and more students. To get more students, they need to keep selling the dream: this degree = your ticket to the good life.

It doesn’t matter that the job market can’t absorb them or that many degrees don’t map neatly into employment. The flow of students (and tuition fees) must keep coming, or the whole edifice will collapse.

If it sounds harsh to call it a Ponzi scheme, remember: the logic of a Ponzi is that the system only sustains itself by constantly pulling in new investors with false promises of returns. Look around at today’s graduate market, and tell me that doesn’t ring true. 

Here’s the irony: historically, universities weren’t primarily about jobs.

Take Plato’s Academy, often held up as the first ‘university’ in the Western tradition. It wasn’t a training school for bureaucrats or doctors. It was a place to learn how to think. To cultivate a method of enquiry. To pursue truth through debate, dialogue, and self-discovery. Plato didn’t promise his students employment. He promised them a framework for finding meaning.

Even in medieval Europe, universities were about broad learning, philosophy, and theology. Vocational training—law, medicine, engineering—always sat alongside this, but it was never the whole picture.

What we’ve done in the last century is fuse the two ideas, and then let the market logic hollow them both out. The modern university sells itself vocational training even when it isn’t, and pays lip service to critical enquiry even when that no longer fits the budget.  

Now, of course, some professions require university. Nobody is arguing you can become a neurosurgeon through YouTube tutorials (or Grey’s Anatomy). Law, medicine, psychology, engineering – those are vocational degrees, and the system exists to train people for them.

But here’s the point: those degrees are the minority. The vast majority of students are in non-vocational subjects – humanities, social sciences, general sciences and business. For them, the ‘degree=job’ promise is far shakier. Employers don’t care if you studied international relations or anthropology. You’re thrown into the same pool as everyone else, hustling for work in a job market that treats you as overqualified and under-experienced at the same time.

And even the vocational students aren’t safe anymore. The job market is saturated. Too many law graduates, too few traineeships. Too many psychology students, too few clinical placements. Junior doctors slogging through an underfunded NHS until they burn out. Nurses trained at great expense only to leave for better pay abroad.

“If higher education is meant to be about cultivating thought and enquiry, then why is it marketed like a vocational guarantee? ”

So, when universities sell the story that a degree is the ‘safest path’ to a career, they’re not just exaggerating. They’re selling an outdated dream that they know the job market can’t deliver on.

This is where ethics gets messy.

Because if you run a university, you know all this. You know that students are piling up debt, that the graduate premium is shrinking and that the economy is precarious. But you need the next intake. You need to fill the halls, pay the staff and cover the loans on the shiny new campus buildings. So you sell the dream anyway.

And if you’re the government, you play along. Because it’s easier to funnel young people into higher education than it is to tackle the real problem: an economy that doesn’t create enough decent jobs.  

So education becomes a holding pen. Can’t find work? Do a degree. Still can’t find work? Do a master’s. Maybe a PhD. Keep yourself out of the unemployment stats, keep paying tuition, keep believing that the next qualification will be the one that unlocks the door.

And those who skipped the carousel altogether – apprentices, tradespeople, people who just went straight to work – start pulling ahead. The supposed ‘losers’ of the system turn out to be its quiet winners.

Here’s where I think the debate needs to go. Not just ‘is university worth it?’ but: is it ethical to keep selling this model at all?

If higher education is meant to be about cultivating thought and enquiry, then why is it marketed like a vocational guarantee? If it’s meant to be vocational training, then why are graduates pouring out into job markets with no space for them?

At what point does ‘expanding opportunity’ become simply mis-selling?

And if universities are now financialised institutions, dependent on property portfolios and tuition churn, then isn’t the real question whether they can even reform themselves, or whether reform has to come from the outside. 

I don’t have all the answers. But I do know this: young people deserve honesty.

If a degree won’t guarantee you a job, we should say so. If the real value is in learning how to think, we should teach and fund it as such. If we want vocational pathways, we should stop pushing every school leaver into higher education and properly fund apprenticeships, training schemes, and alternative routes.

Above all, we need to fix the economy that sits underneath all of this. Because no amount of ‘employability modules’ will make up for a labour market where graduate jobs are scarce, precarious, and underpaid.

Plato thought his Academy would teach students a method of enquiry so rigorous that truth would reveal itself. That’s still the best defence of education I can think of. Not training. Not ‘investment in human capital.’ Just the stubborn belief that learning how to think matters.

But when it’s drowned in debt, in job-market anxiety, in the Ponzi logic of university expansion and performance indicators, it stops being noble. It starts being a scam.

So what does university mean to young people now? For too many, it means learning without purpose, debt without security.

If that’s the case, then the lie isn’t just hurting students. It’s corroding the very idea of education as a public good.

Scotland has a choice. We can keep expanding this Ponzi scheme, hoping nobody notices the returns aren’t real. Or we can be honest: education is about cultivating people, not selling futures. And if we really care about those futures, then we need to build an economy – and an education system – that treats young people as more than revenue streams.

Because the scandal isn’t that universities can’t deliver jobs. It’s that we let them keep promising that they will, for their own illogical gains.