The United Kingdom now has an oversupply of university graduates, and students should no longer view a degree as a guaranteed route to social advancement, according to a senior university leader.
Prof Shitij Kapur, vice chancellor of King’s College London, said the era when universities could confidently promise strong job prospects for graduates has ended, as nearly half of the population now enters higher education.
Kapur argued that a degree today functions more like a “visa” than a “passport” to success, reflecting weaker wage advantages for graduates and intensifying competition from artificial intelligence and overseas talent. “The competition for graduate jobs is not just all because of AI filling out forms or AI taking away jobs. It’s also because of the stalling of our economy and causing a relative surplus of graduates,” he said.
He added that the value of a degree has become increasingly conditional. “So the simple promise of a good job if you get a university degree, has now become conditional on which university you went to, which course you took.”
“The old equation of the university as a passport to social mobility, meant that if you got a degree you were almost certain to get a job as a socially mobile citizen. Now it has become a visa for social mobility – it gives you the chance to visit the arena that has graduate jobs and the related social mobility, but whether you can make it there is not a guarantee.”
The debate over the worth of higher education has intensified in recent years. In 2025, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the long standing ambition for 50 percent of young people to attend university was “not right for our times,” effectively ending a target set by Tony Blair in 1999. Two years earlier, then prime minister Rishi Sunak had described the same goal as “The false dream of 50% of children going to university … was one of the great mistakes of the last 30 years.”
Kapur said such outcomes were anticipated decades ago. He pointed to sociologist Martin Trow, who predicted that as higher education expanded from serving a small elite to a broad cross section of society, degrees would inevitably lose their exceptional status.
As participation rises, Kapur said Trow expected three consequences. “Social regard for the exceptionalism of university graduates will go down. The second thing is, the graduate premium will go down, because a degree will become something that’s not scarce at all. And from being a privilege, it [a university education] will start becoming a necessity” for engaging in advanced economies.
“I think in the UK, we are reaching that point now,” Kapur said.
Data from the Department for Education shows graduates in England still earn more and have higher employment rates than non graduates. However, real wages for younger graduates have barely moved over the past decade. Kapur noted that weak economic growth coincided with the introduction of £9,000 tuition fees and expanded student loans in 2012, calling it “the worst possible time” to shift costs onto students.
In 2022, Kapur described the state of UK higher education as a “triangle of sadness,” linking rising student debt, government policies that eroded fee values through inflation, and mounting pressure on university staff. He now says the situation has deteriorated further, with domestic tuition fees frozen at levels that fail to cover teaching costs.
Despite the challenges, Kapur said UK universities remain among the world’s best, in part because of higher fees paid by international students. Those revenues support research excellence and help institutions maintain strong global rankings, which in turn benefit domestic students through broader course offerings and access to leading academics.
However, recent restrictions on international student visas and the introduction of a levy on overseas fees risk undermining that model. Kapur said the issue deserves careful national debate.
“The role of international students in our universities is a national conversation we need to have. International students are not some sort of oddity or indulgence of our universities. They are now a fundamental feature of our system,” he said, warning that abrupt policy changes could harm universities, students and national productivity.
Looking ahead, Kapur argued that universities will play a critical role in the UK’s economic future. “The older technologies and manufacturing productivity gains have run their cycle,” he said.
“We have to invent at the cutting edge, or apply at the cutting edge so that we are the makers and not the takers of the next technological revolution – and universities will have a central role in doing that.”
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