OR ARE YOUNG PEOPLE JUST WHINGERS?
Evidence is mounting that graduates are being treated as second-class citizens. The spread of internships means you’re expected to work for nothing for exploitative employers – and you receive no protection from the law (which officials are failing to enforce because it’s “not a good use of public money.”). When you take these internships, you become invisible – you don’t appear anywhere in the official figures.
Four in ten young employed people feel you are “not part of society.” In your desperation to start earning – and pay off your debt – one in five of you say you’d consider prostitution (or at least escorting). One of you has even told Graduate Fog that the sex industry is the only place where graduates feel welcome.
And it seems that the establishment even seems to condone the idea that you should sell your body to pay for your education. An academic said recently that graduates should be allowed to sell their kidneys in order to raise funds to pay off your debts. It was recently announced that young, unemployed people with no children will also go to the back of the queue for council housing.
What do you think – are graduates treated as second-class citizens? Or have young people always been skint and vulnerable to exploitation?
The phrase ‘second-class citizens’ is overly melodramatic – who is looking at graduates and non-graduates and saying that they consider the non-grads to be better?
I think the problem is partly that graduates – perfectly understandably – want to move into competitive, high-level careers. There are more candidates than there are jobs, and employers are taking advantage of this with unpaid internships and the like, which I fully condemn. But I don’t think it’s ‘having a degree’ that’s the problem – it’s wanting to work in somewhere competitive, and the government being unwilling to enforce the law.
@Rhian
Thanks for commenting. I agree that ‘second class citizen might seem overly dramatic, but then I looked up the definition and it says:
“A citizen, especially a member of a minority group, who is denied the social, political and economic benefits of citizenship.”
I’m not sure graduates count as a ‘minority group’ (!) but the basic comparison is fair I think. As interns, graduates are not being protected by the NMW law, a law which protects all other workers. Do you see brickies or nurses or shop workers working for less than the NMW? Or spending hours on applications for full-time ‘jobs’ that pay no wages, just to gain experience? Even though most unpaid interns ARE actually entitled to the NMW, our employers and policitians seem to feel that you are a separate category of worker (citizen?) who is not deserving of the same legal rights and protection as everybody else.
And that academic appeared to be suggesting that the laws on transplant donations should be ‘relaxed’ so that those in need of the money – and here she singled out graduates – would be able to tap this source of revenue…
I think it will be interesting to see how your consumer rights are affected too. There was a case of a student in America who sued her university because her degree didnt’ give her the ‘in’ into the workplace that her university said it would, when she bought it. Clearly that’s an extreme case, but if I’d spent £30,000 on my degree and found that it had no value in the world of work I think I’d be pretty unhappy. If i spent that amount on a car and it wouldn’t start, you can bet I’d be taking the manufacturer to court!
I suppose I think that ‘graduate’ and ‘intern’ aren’t completely interchangeable. Almost none of the graduates I know (across all disciplines) have done unpaid internships. One friend tried for the IBM graduate program, didn’t get in so did a Masters, tried again and got in (and still works for them, he’s now 30). Another temped for a year before getting a position at PwC. Another went straight into a graduate job from uni. I work for a magazine publishers which doesn’t (to my knowledge) offer internships; everyone here got an entry-level position after university and worked up. Other friends have chosen family commitments in parts of the country with no graduate jobs so have resigned themselves to non-graduate careers in things like retail or fast food.
Actually, the only person I know who has done internships works in the charity sector (the one place that can justify the word ‘volunteer’!) and that’s only because he’s moved around and changed areas a few times. He’s also not a traditional graduate – older, with an Open University degree, owns his own flat.
None of them have ever had any less rights than any non-graduates I know (including me – after leaving uni I temped, did admin jobs and eventually got a lucky break). The academic’s comments were stupid and ridiculous, and also completely overlook the fact that the people who are really desperate for money are nowhere near as educated as graduates.
The consumer rights is an interesting issue, and with increased fees I suspect we’ll see a lot more of that sort of thing in the UK.
(And I used to date a nursing student – felt obliged to point out that nurses are often graduates too)
I think young people in general are treated badly. Young people who did not go to university may not be dealing with the unpaid internship situation but they have plenty of other problems with the job market right now.
From society’s point of view a young person is an adult when it comes to things like being expected to work, paying tax and criminal responsibility but when it comes to having enough money to live on or being able to afford a place to live then the response is “you’re only young, you can live off your parents like a teenager,”.
Also while we are all used to people “demonising” teenagers I think this attitude is starting to spread to people in their twenties, both graduates and non graduates.
@Rhian
Wow, I think you are in a pretty unique position if you only have one friend who has had to do an unpaid internship in order to find paid work! Unfortunately, there are (at least) tens of thousands of young people who ARE in this position : (
And you’re right, the words intern and graduate aren’t interchangeable. Not all graduates are interns – but most interns are graduates.
Also, i’m intrigued – which magazine publisher doesn’t use unpaid interns? And was the job you got in editorial or ads?
And for the record, I disagree with your statement that the charity sector is “the one place that can justify the word ‘volunteer’”… Sadly, although of course there is an important role for genuine volunteering, i believe many charities are exploiting a loophole in the NMW legislation to gain unlimited free admin support from young people keen to forge careers in the charity sector, which I believe is not true volunteering.
I wrote about this for the Guardian a couple of months ago:
Are charities’ unpaid interns really volunteers?
Call me controversial but I feel some of the problem is with the oversubscribing to a University education. When I was young a University Education was for only the brightest (and to an extent the wealthiest) – I for example didn’t go to to University – the reason being that my older brother who just about scraped through his A levels took precedence. I think it’s fair to say that back then as well people would look at University as the stepping stone to a specific career rather than now where the multitude of courses available do not lead specifically to a certain job in many cases. Many of my employees have degrees in the Arts and while I’m not saying they are not worth anything – they bear very little relevance to the work many graduates are trying to get into.
To be honest I feel the whole education system from secondary upwards is a mess with grades getting better every year and it becoming more difficult for people to recognize the best of the best. The end result is a lot of bright and sometimes not so bright graduates lacking real direction all being treated the same as it’s no longer possible to distinguish the true talent from the average.
I think I agree. As a graduate with a Masters and an almost obscenely good education, what am I doing with it? Living at home, and almost giddy with joy when I was offered an xmas temp position in my town centre.
As a graduate I don’t feel like I have any rights. Who am I going to talk to – the job centre? My local MP, I’m pretty sure my problems come behind housing and waste management. Do I have a voice? I don’t think so. I don’t live in London, (where a lot of the funding for younger people go) and in short, it is pretty much like I don’t exist. And unpaid internships serve to take us even further off the grid, because although we’re working we can’t claim benefit, but doing the internship means that we can’t apply for paid work because you *never know*.
It’s like we’re in a permanent state of limbo. I have friends that are just going back to school and taking the loans because at least its 2-3 years where you know what you’re doing instead of living off your next job rejection or hope of an interview. Also, it’s not right that people over the age of 21 are working as temps – those jobs are for 16-19 year olds who are looking to get their first few years of experience. S’not right.