Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Degrees cost more, deliver less
Requirements that linger
Companies have spent the last few years publicly dropping degree requirements, but fewer than one in 700 new hires actually benefited from those changes. The jobs that didn't require a degree have largely disappeared anyway.
The cost of a degree
In the UK, tuition fees tripled in 2012. In the US, the average student borrower carries nearly $40,000 in federal debt alone. Young people took on that debt assuming a degree would translate into a graduate-level job.
Graduates in a cooler market
In 2024, over a million students graduated from UK universities, and the share landing in roles that require a degree fell to its lowest level since 2014. For the first time on record, the unemployment rate for recent US graduates has started to exceed the overall unemployment rate. The post-pandemic hiring boom has also cooled, hitting young workers first: in the UK, employment among young people in 2025 still hadn't recovered to where it was in 2019, even as adult employment has grown steadily.
Why do employers demand degrees for ordinary jobs?
Researchers call it degree inflation. A 2014 report from Burning Glass Technologies and Harvard Business School, Dismissed by Degrees, found that 65 percent of job postings for executive assistants asked for a bachelor's degree while only 19 percent of the people already working in those jobs held one. A degree works as a cheap filter when a posting draws hundreds of applicants, even if the work itself has not changed.
Why did UK tuition fees triple in 2012?
A 2010 independent review led by Lord Browne recommended shifting university funding from direct government grants to student fees. The coalition government then cut most teaching grants and raised the cap on annual fees in England from about 3,000 pounds to 9,000 pounds. Students pay through income-contingent loans, which are repaid as a percentage of earnings above a set threshold, and any remaining balance is written off after a fixed number of years.
How many graduates work in non-graduate jobs?
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York tracks underemployment among recent US college graduates, meaning those working in jobs that typically do not require a degree. In recent years its series has hovered around 40 percent, and it has stayed high through both expansions and recessions. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics classifies graduate-level roles using its standard occupational classification, which is how figures on graduate jobs are produced.