Why do people keep picking the university route?

I have no regrets about my decision – bar the fact I certainly wasn’t the most informed when making one of the biggest financial decisions of my life at age 18 – but I would be lying if I said that I would feel confident in a decision to enter HE in 2026.

Last week, my colleague David Kernohan dug into whether graduates are facing the worst jobs market on record, unpicking Adzuna data showing a 45 per cent fall in graduate-targeted vacancies year on year, and an average of just 8,383 graduate roles advertised per day in July 2026.

Elsewhere, recent media coverage has questioned the all time high of 262,820 18 year olds entering university this September.

That’s a lot of graduates who will want to enter the workforce in the next couple of years, and the job market doesn’t appear ready for them.

The latest student loan forecasts outline that for Plan 2 borrowers with the current mean balance of £52,100, they will need to earn £63,600 in 2026–27 just to stop that balance growing. At the UK median full-time salary of £39,039, a typical Plan 2 borrower’s balance rises by around £1,692 a year instead of falling.

Only those forecast to earn £45,000 or more, five years after they start repaying, have even a fifty-fifty chance of clearing the loan in full. That forecast is absurd – I’d make a comedy skit about it if I wasn’t a Plan 2 borrower myself.

When we look at Plan 5 borrowers – which includes the majority of the huge cohort we will see join in September – the statistics look marginally less bleak. With the current mean loan balance being £45,800. The earnings needed to stop that balance growing is £43,625, compared with the astonishing £63,000 for Plan 2. While Plan 5 is a materially easier deal than Plan 2, the average graduate earns roughly £13,600 below the Plan 5 “stop growing” threshold. The reality is that it doesn’t matter what loan plan graduates are on because the economy seems like it will never be able to support them to pay them back.

So if there are nearly 1,012,000 young people aged 18-24 not in education, training or employment, an unemployment crisis, and the impossibility of paying off your student debt unless you’re earning well above average, why does university remain the top choice?

There’s a few easy answers but it starts with the fact that there aren’t that many alternatives on offer.

Despite both Burnham and the public’s adoration with apprenticeships, they’re in short supply and are incredibly competitive with no guarantee of a qualification at the end. UCAS data shows that one in three students previously interested in studying an apprenticeship said they changed their mind due to a lack of roles in their desired career. Prospective students don’t doubt they’re valuable, there just isn’t enough.

If there’s to be another quarter of a million grads in three years time (give or take), will there be a quarter of a million apprenticeships or trainee roles ready for them to go into. I’m not convinced. And for those that want more independence at a younger age, one of the limited routes to adult independence is to saddle yourself with the student loan.

So for 18 year olds at college or sixth form, their options are to enter the workforce early, fight tooth and nail for an apprenticeship, or apply to university.

Burnham has made clear his support for more technical routes as he plans to devolve more powers over 16-19 technical education.

The open question is whether that devolved funding is sufficient enough of a lever to build a genuine market for graduate-level jobs, technical routes and expand the traditional apprenticeship pipeline so as to offer a complimentary – not competing – offer to higher education. But the situation remains that many people will complete their university degrees in three years time, and creating more apprenticeships isn’t going to change that.

So, what will the state do to support the many incoming graduates – tackling the apprenticeship option fixes one end of the pipeline, but not the other.