Spend ten minutes talking to a soon-to-be graduate about their job search and you might come away convinced that a university degree has become a confidence trick.

The class of 2025 spent the better part of a year sending hundreds of applications for a handful of replies. The class of 2026 is now graduating into the same market and reporting similar experiences. Employers have warned of falls in entry-level hiring. The recent British Social Attitudes survey has found that a third of people surveyed thought that a degree “just isn’t worth the amount of time and money”.

The numbers do nothing to soften the picture. Youth unemployment among 16-to-24-year-olds reached 16.2 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, the highest in more than a decade. Graduate hiring fell 8 per cent from 2024 to 2025, the weakest year since the pandemic. Employers are fielding an average of 140 applications for every vacancy, according to the Institute of Student Employers’ 2025 student recruitment survey.