I’m a teacher – this is the advice I give students who fear the jobs apocalypse

This weekend, like thousands of others, I accompanied a sixth-form pupil on a university open day visit. It happened to be to my alma mater, Exeter. Whatever he and his friend made of studying sciences at a buzzing campus in a cultured city, the conversation in the long drive back veered towards Alan Milburn’s report into the “lost generation” of one million young NEETs (not in employment, education or training).

How might that influence their choice of university and course? Our teenagers need as much help as they can get in their decision-making – and not necessarily from parents, whose university experience was, literally, last century.

As a sixth-form tutor, it’s my role to help them professionally. Many readers will recognise the period in which 16- to 18-year-olds must engage with the UCAS entry process of personal statements, references, EPQs and more can be the most stressful of their children’s young lives.

They must make decisions that might affect their employment and financial futures – plus their mental health, cultural taste and lifelong social and other networks. They must do so, conscious of the ever-weightier debt burden they will incur and aware of parental anxiety that can sometimes explode into tense conversations.

My pupils are relatively lucky. We devote protected weekly curriculum space and many hours more to investigating their options. Then, they somehow decide that yes, they want to spend their lives in data management or criminology. Many schools cannot provide such support – and many sixth-formers are left bewildered, caught between the rock of those “lost generation” headlines and the hard place that is pursuing something they love.

Despite those headlines, around 88 to 89 per cent of graduates find work or further study within 15 months of finishing university. The idea that swathes of graduates are drifting jobless after three years of lectures simply isn’t borne out by the data. Subject choice does matter, but not in the simplistic way it’s presented.

Graduates in so-called “high-skilled employment” come in around 82 per cent for science graduates and 72 per cent for non-science graduates. It’s a real gap, but not a chasm. Earnings show a similar pattern. Medicine, engineering, computing and economics subject graduates sit at the top of the early-career pay tables, while arts and humanities subjects cluster lower down. Yet even here, the spread is often less dramatic than stereotypes suggest and can reflect career pathways more than actual ability.

Bluntly, most humanities graduates do find work. The difference is often in what kind of work and early years’ pay. So yes, STEM subjects and vocational degrees offer a statistically smoother runway into high-skilled jobs. But the data does not support a binary narrative of “useful” versus “useless” degrees.

The truth is that university is not just a labour-market transaction. It is also three or more years of intellectual investment and identity forming. The best outcomes, financially and personally, tend to come when students choose not just what looks safest, but what genuinely engages them. I always advise (for A-level and degree): do something you love. Evidence suggests that the best degree is still in a subject you can stand thinking about on Monday mornings for the next 40 years. And, to better protect their children’s mental health, that’s what parents should focus on.