Christian Debt Recovery

Debt Wave Complaints

May 3rd, 2010 |

Author: Gavin

Proud to be a graduate: A note to society, you can’t kick us into the gutter that easily

According to Claire Whitmell, in a guest post she wrote for the graduatefog website, some employers are saying that Generation Y (those who were born after 1980) feel entitled, impatient, are immature and illiterate. She explains that employers complain of graduates who want the graduate job without having to work for it, of thinking that a degree takes the place of experience and of thinking that graduates deserve some kind of special treatment because of their degree. She further explains that bosses regularly complain that graduates have the attention span of a flea, largely because of the cut-and-paste attitude attached to multi-tasking, that graduates aren’t ready for the world of work and that they lack basic written and numeracy skills, drifting towards ‘text speak’.

In their defence Whitmell says that if she were in debt to £30,000 she would feel entitled to a job too. She says that if graduates flit from one thing to another, maybe that’s the fault of the digital revolution that they have emerged into. The other two complaints, immaturity and lack of written and numeric skills she describes as ‘old chestnuts’, and I have to say I agree there, we could waffle on for hours about maturity and literacy standards without anything productive coming out of it.

Another interesting snippet from the graduate fog website is the news that 1 in 5 graduates, 20%, are now out of work. I strongly suspect actually that much of the remainder has found itself in low-status ‘piece-rate’ jobs such as call-centres and shelf-stacking in supermarkets and the like. Essentially, graduates are now more than twice as likely to be unemployed than the rest of the population. Even worse, it seems that before too long the average price of a postgraduate qualification will be around £9,000, due largely to, you guessed it, more government cuts. This means that such qualifications will be pulled away from all but the wealthiest graduates.

Last May (2010) a graduate calling herself ‘Caroline’ told graduatefog that she’s sick of being labelled and “just want what’s fair”. She drew attention to politicians saying that graduates should get ‘work experience’ and stated “yes we know this, but why does it have to be endless and unpaid?”

I have some interesting news for my younger contemporaries, assuming you haven’t realised this already that is. You are not the only ones. In my experience, the same attitude has been displayed to older graduates, many of whom also can’t find a decent job, never mind graduate level job. I graduated in 2008. After sending out hundreds of applications over the course of June, July and August of that year I eventually managed to find a recruitment agency who were willing to take me on as a temp. I managed to struggle along in this situation until March 2010 with my last appointment, with the Crown Prosecution Service in Bristol, being by far the best and most productive in terms of gaining extra experience, in addition that is, to the years of experience I already had before entering uni. Then came the government’s freeze on public sector recruitment and consequently several months of unemployment, during which, most of the time, I didn’t claim Job Seekers Allowance but scraped a small income doing odd gardening jobs while continuing to look for work.

Since about November last year I’ve been freelancing, a self-employed freelance writer, researcher and administrator. The money isn’t great, it never is when you’re starting out in such a manner, but at least its better than the dole, and it at least allows me to retain my self-respect to some extent – writers still enjoy some kind of decent status in society.

To my mind the message in all this is clear – graduates have effectively been dumped by the current generation of employers, some of whom, along with those uneducated members of the electorate who perhaps feel jealous of our levels of intelligence, choose to insult us and denigrate us at every opportunity. I choose to struggle on as a freelancer precisely because I choose not to accept such criticism, because I refuse to reduce myself to a level lower than I am worth, because although it’s now clear that my attendance at university has effectively been flushed down the toilet by this current political generation and the corporations they pay homage to, I still believe in myself and I therefore refuse to be enslaved.

We graduates have been tolerating and accepting ill-treatment for far too long. Considering the expense and the hard work that goes in to the earning of a degree, we should be proud of ourselves and we should refuse to accept the denigration and insults of a society that has forgotten us.

I fully believe that graduates and students should be far more vocal, and I see the recent wave of student protest as only the beginning of that process.

It’s time we hit back

About the Author

I am a graduate of Bath Spa University, I graduated with a BA (Hons) in Psychology and English in 2008. I am also a former environmental activist and environmental issues and energy-related topics remain my major interest as a freelance writer and researcher. I have been published in various magazines over the years and write regular articles on renewables for a technical recruitment website.