Why earning doesn't live up to learning

Young people are told they live in a learning society and a "knowledge-based economy" and that they need to commit themselves to lifelong learning. The statistical evidence is quite clear: the more formal educational qualifications held by young people, the better their prospects for employment and earning. That is, however, at the aggregate level. At the individual level, there is an increasing number of stories of young people who have found their destinations do not match their educational achievement.

In the UK, the first generation of students to have paid top-up fees have just graduated to face the challenge of a contracting labour market. Commentators have said that "sensible" graduates will lower their expectations in order to strengthen their chances of getting a job. So much for the energy spent in challenging low aspirations. Many, of course, will do so, for exactly those pragmatic reasons, but that will not stop them feeling they have been short-changed and let down.

A few years behind them is a cohort of young people whose A-level results are apparently the best ever. There has been year-on-year improvement for 27 years, leading to the all-too-familiar allegations that the exams have become easier or the assessment more lenient. This is unfair on the students concerned - although next year there are to be some changes, introducing tougher tests and an A* classification to identify the very brightest. This year, however, many young people from a generation of high-achieving students are finding they are still unable to access the university courses they had set their hearts on. Some will not get a place at any university, despite achieving grades that would have almost certainly guaranteed entry to higher education a few years ago.

The newspapers are full of stories of young people who, when faced with this predicament, turned elsewhere - to, for example, jobs, gap years, entrepreneurship and volunteering. But I would place a hefty bet that those alternatives were grabbed largely by young people with some level of hidden resource behind them. Even if the resources (of savings, inheritance, parents or whatever) were not actually used for those purposes, they provide young people with the confidence to venture down alternative paths.

Other young people are not so fortunate. They will, no doubt, for the most part be resilient and stoical about their circumstances: what else can they say but that they have to get on with it? But I am equally convinced that many of this year's graduates and A-level successes will also harbour a lingering grievance about the way they have been treated, especially if they find themselves up the creek without a paddle.

Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan.