‘I'm forking out £70k to become a lawyer, but the salary is a pittance'
Going into a white-collar profession, like law or engineering, has long guaranteed a lucrative and stable career.
You would go to university to qualify for a specific job and be set for life – all with little or no student debt.
But for young people entering the workforce now, the equation is less simple.
Taking on the huge burden of student loans and any further qualification costs, while facing stagnant wages, means that the traditional professions, with their years of training and low pay, look far less enticing. Meanwhile, minimum wage is rising to around the same rate as graduate pay.
Application numbers for practical degrees in traditional white-collar industries – law, accounting and finance, medicine and engineering – have increased in the past five years, with growth as much as 36pc.
But some students are graduating to find that the 'easy' path to a white-collar career is now broken.
'What is the point?'
Naomi Cicconie, 39, is an unusual law student. She served five years in the military before joining the prison service, and then worked in a children's home while she did her law degree at the University of South Wales.
She has spent £54,000 on her degree, and will have to pay out a further £13,900 on the Legal Practice Certificate (LPC), which she is planning to start later this year. All in, that's nearly £70,000 just to qualify as a lawyer, not including living costs.
The entry-level salary in Wales, where she lives and works, is around £22,000. Cicconie says that even once she is fully qualified, she'll likely earn between £28,000 and £42,000.
'You're spending all of this money to get a job [with a salary] that is under 50pc of what you've borrowed to qualify. It makes no sense,' she says. 'I am at a stage now where I am thinking to myself, 'What is the point?''
Corporate law comes with famously large salaries, especially for those working at American firms in the City, where those who have just qualified can expect to be paid as much as £180,000.
But for most of those outside big cities, working in certain types of law, or in legal aid – a crucial aspect of the justice system which Cicconie works in – six-figure salaries are unthinkable. Cicconie says many of her colleagues have left, blaming low pay.
She adds: 'I would say to anyone who is joining a bit later, and wants to get on with their career, don't go anywhere near [legal aid]. Unless you're lucky to be in the financial position where you don't have the stress of needing to earn a certain amount of money.'
Soaring student debt and stagnant wages
The economic situation for all young people is tough. The average graduate salary 15 months on from their studies, for those who graduated in 2022, was £27,500, according to the Higher Education Statistics Authority. In 2010, the average was £20,000 – if salaries had kept pace with inflation, they would now be more than £30,000.
Pay for all full-time employees decreased by 2pc in real terms between 2010 and April last year, according to House of Commons research. For those aged between 22 and 29, it dropped by 10pc.
And while average graduate pay has fallen in real terms by about 4pc over the past two decades, the minimum wage has risen by 60pc, according to analysis by the Resolution Foundation.
It means that someone working full-time on minimum wage can earn £25,000 a year, similar to or higher than some graduate salaries. It found that 20 years ago, the median graduate starting out in their career earned around two-and-a-half times the minimum wage.
Add to this the burden of student debt. University tuition fees are set to rise for the first time in eight years when the new academic year starts this September, from £9,250 to £9,535.
The average graduate has a debt of more than £48,000, according to the Student Loans Company, and newer graduates face a more onerous repayment system, especially if they are what are considered high earners.
Most professions require a university degree, unless they are on apprenticeship schemes – and many require extra qualifications, such as Cicconie's LPC, some of which have to be paid for out of the student's own pocket. Many legal firms now prefer the Solicitor's Qualifying Exam (SQE), which will cost a total of £4,908 from this September, having risen from £4,790.
Even once a young professional has qualified, pay remains suppressed. Engineers, for example, are much less well-paid in the UK than the US, with an average salary of £37,000 compared to entry-level pay of $74,000 (£55,000) for American graduates, according to Glassdoor.
Low pay is not the only problem. Working from home, quickly changing workplaces with badly organised training, and the threat of the rise of AI, all contribute to a sense of rising frustration. The chief executive of AI firm, Anthropic, has predicted that it will destroy half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in five years.
Meanwhile, vacancy levels are back to pre-pandemic levels, according to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, with a 5.5pc drop in openings compared to November last year. Demand for workers surged initially as the economy recovered from the pandemic, but has slowed down since.
The costly hurdles to entering a profession
For some would-be white collar workers, getting into their desired profession has come with unexpected training and costly qualifications.
One biochemistry graduate, who completed his undergraduate degree in 2022 and now works for the NHS in the north of England, says he's frustrated about poor communication about how much more training he would need.
He needs a specific technical qualification, but there are only so many training positions available, for which you need to be sponsored. He explains: 'To do an Institute of Biomedical Science training portfolio, you have to be sponsored and in an approved laboratory. Usually by taking a trainee Band 5 position, of which there are naturally a limited number.
'This is incredibly frustrating as it bottlenecks the whole process and, for me at least, wasn't clearly explained at university. It feels like I'm banging my head against a brick wall.'
Architects are among those who face years-long training requirements. After an undergraduate degree, a year in practice, and then a master's degree, young landscape architects also face a two-year process to gain 'chartered' status. And after having jumped through these various hurdles, and totted up years' worth of student debt, pay in architecture is notoriously low.
One 27-year-old landscape architect, who has finally completed his formal training, says: 'My main thought is that it is unnecessarily long. I don't think we need to spend the amount of time at university that we did.
'Although it is fun, and I enjoyed doing my masters, when I look back on it I think I would have benefited from spending more time in practice.'
Another young landscape architect says that while there are jobs available in the UK, the bigger salaries are in Scandinavia and the US. There, he says, 'it's paid a lot higher, it's valued more'.
While training, landscape architects in the UK can expect between £17,000 and £20,000, he says, but once you have a master's degree, this increases to around £30,000.
To get there, he took on tens of thousands in student debt for his degrees, including a master's that cost £12,000, and maintenance. But like many young people he avoids looking at how much student loan he owes. 'I would imagine most people try not to think about it, don't they? I am probably quite deep in a hole.'
'Have I just wasted three years?'
Some young people pursuing a 'traditional' white-collar career feel like they fell – or were pushed – into it. One final year student at Glasgow University says that she 'leaned in' to the pressure to study law because her parents told her she would be good at it.
'I am now in my final year and I look back and I never really asked myself if this is something I want,' she says. 'I think of doing law at the end of it as an actual punishment. It's really scary, because I look back and think, 'Have I just wasted three years?''
She worries that she rushed into a 'professional' degree, and that she might have got more fulfilment studying something she enjoyed more.
'It's not a bad thing to have under my belt. But I do look back and wonder whether I would have been better off studying something else. I have friends who are studying degrees such as sculpture and environmental practice. I find their curriculum so much more enriching, although not a proper profession.'
Increasing numbers of school leavers are choosing a different path, opting for degree apprenticeships, which sets them up for the same careers but without the student debt.
Iyioluwa Adesan, 25, joined NatWest as a digital apprentice.
He says: 'My parents, like many others, viewed university as the only credible route to success because it was the only route they had been exposed to. But deep down, I knew I wasn't naturally suited to the academic, theory-heavy approach of a traditional university. I was more practical. I needed a different kind of learning environment.'
Adesan spent five years at NatWest, completing an undergraduate degree, and now works to connect potential apprentices to full-time work. Those working in accounting and finance apprenticeships can expect to earn an average of £29,945 after five years.
But Adesan did feel cut out of the social life of university. He says: 'The social side was different. There was no freshers' week or vibrant campus life in the traditional sense.'
There were friendships made at work, he says, and over time he developed a professional network. He adds: 'I want to help shift the perception around apprenticeships. They are not a second option, just a less visible one.'
He's now started his own company, supporting other apprentices.
Conor Cotton, of Not Going To Uni, said: 'We continue to see a clear increase in interest around non-university routes, especially apprenticeships.
'For many young people, the recent announcement on increasing tuition fees has become an even stronger reason to avoid student debt, and developing practical skills is becoming increasingly appealing compared to the traditional university route.'
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