Been thinking about how my knitting group is mostly made up of gen x and boomers (see me being the only millennial, b’96) and their shared views on further education. Last week they were talking about GCSE results and how they’re made too big a deal of / are only really needed for further education which is, in their collective opinion, a waste of money. It’s wild to me that this is the consensus now because when I was in school, university was crammed down my throat. Any adult at the time would tell you that the only way you’d get a career was to have a degree, yeah it’s 9K a year for it + interest but you only have to pay that back once you earn over a certain amount. “It’s like fake debt.” All of my friends at school went to university. Many of them have Masters. By the time I finished my undergrad, apprenticeships had changed to include graduates. Shock horror, an entire generation steered into further education didn’t suddenly make more jobs.
I said at this knitting group that I wasn’t worried about my student loan. They were shocked, like genuinely shocked. I acknowledged that my student loan is like £60K +, but I’m not worried, because I can’t fathom earning enough for it to do me any damage. That’s what was meant by the “fake debt” that I heard at 16, talking to career advisors about university. It’s almost like we were told the only way to secure a job as an adult was to have a degree by a whole lot of people who knew we’d still never earn enough to pay it back, and now it’s being reflected on as this foolish decision we collectively as a generation made.
I agree that there’s are a lot of jobs now that have pointless barrier degrees required. It’s not fair to a lot of people who could be doing those jobs / want to do them, and can’t and or don’t want to do a degree - this was a big talking point at the knit n knatter. I wanted to stress this so hard though; millennials didn’t do this. I sat there and listened as it was made out like our generation was the one that put these new barriers in place because we all just had to go out and get these pointlessly expensive degrees, and now everyone needs them which isn’t fair. Like no shit. It wasn’t fair on us either. A lot of my friends have post grad degrees (and a lot more debt) because when they graduated, those jobs they were told they could get still weren’t there, so they were encouraged to get the next qualification possible. None of my friends ended up in jobs where they’d need their degrees, I didn’t need mine for the job I have now either - and it’s sad as fuck to me that we’ve all accepted we probably won’t ever be able to afford to pay these loans back. It’s like some twisted envy cycle where people I know who do pay monthly towards their loans are like “you’re lucky you don’t have to pay it” vs us who wish we were earning enough money for it to even matter.
I didn’t know how to say all this at my knitting group, I wish I’d been able to say even a little though because it’s genuinely so frustrating that even on the other side or the further education push (that a lot of us were steered into), we’re still seen as this entitled generation. I’m sorry I can’t afford to take my student loads seriously? I’m sorry I don’t earn enough even with my degree to pay monthly minimum contributions? Sorry I don’t know many people my age who can?
