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The vice-chancellor of one of the UK’s top universities has warned: degree A good job is no longer guaranteed graduateciting crowded markets and the impact of artificial intelligence.
Professor Shitij Kapur, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of King’s College London, said that in the highly competitive UK graduate employment landscape, the qualification was now “like having a visa” rather than “a passport to social mobility”.
He told the Guardian: “Competition for graduate jobs isn’t just about AI filling in forms or taking away jobs.
“It’s also because our economy is stagnant and it’s because we have too many graduates.
“So I feel like that simple promise (of a good job) has now become conditional on, ‘Where did you go to college? What courses did you take?'”
“University serves as a vehicle for social mobility, almost a passport to social mobility, which means that if you get a degree, you are guaranteed to find a job as a socially mobile citizen.
“But now I think it has become a social mobility visa, which means you have the opportunity to visit that place called social mobility.
“Maybe you’ll get there, maybe you won’t.”
He added that a college education has become a necessity for many people and is no longer a scarce thing.
Meanwhile, students are racking up debt and facing tuition reductions.
He pointed out that domestic tuition fees are not enough to cover the cost of teaching undergraduates, and university faculty are also stretched thin.
Universities can use higher fees to support research and also offer students the opportunity to study a wider range of courses.