One thing I love about London is the free newspapers – The Metro and The Evening Standard, both of which I believe possess a high quality of journalism, are easy to read, and (I believe) are not owned by Rupert Murdoch.
However, like with most papers, you always get some grumpy old git writing in and ranting about something. I occasionally chuck in my two cents on online newspaper forums (i.e. on the Guardian or Telegraph’s website, or even Southampton’s dreaded local Daily Echo), but I don’t think I’ve ever been riled up enough to write in to reply to someone else’s opinion until now. I had forgotten about it for a few days, then remembered it and decided to fire off a retort.
Last week someone wrote in complaining that graduates should not be seeking/taking minimum wage jobs, as if graduates 1. Had a choice and 2. Were rich enough not to and 3. Spent 3 years and thousands of pounds with the aim of getting a job they could have probably got anyway. Not that I have anything against minimum wage jobs (a job is better than no job), but the guy’s attitude really pissed me off. So I wrote this reply;
”I am replying to a letter a week or two old but one I feel is still relevant. One of your readers wrote in saying that graduates should leave minimum wage jobs to non-graduates. I find this incredibly narrow-minded as the whole point of going to university, at least in my opinion, is to try and secure a better paid job in the long run. Unfortunately, in the current climate there are a lot of people with degrees and seemingly very few jobs for graduates. I graduated 4 years ago and have not since found degree-related work; I have had to get by by temping in office jobs and working seasonal retail jobs for minimum wage.
If your reader thinks that people commit to 3 years or more or university, and get into thousands of pounds of debt with the ‘goal’ of attaining a minimum wage job then he completely misunderstands the whole point of university. While some students do go simply because they ‘do not now what they want to do’ or want to distract themselves for a few years, most of us do actually want to get a career out of it. Previously the whole point of (free education at) university was the taxpayer covers us until we get higher paid jobs and therefore pay back more tax into the system. Now of course loans and higher fees are the norm and a generation of debt-ridden twentysomethings with no job prospects has arisen.
Not all of us are rich enough to sit around and wait for a degree job, people like myself have responsibilities and rent and bills to pay and have to take any job given. Although I apply for graduate jobs, I also apply for ANY work as I do not like not doing nothing and living off benefits like a large minority of our society sadly do. In the shop I work in, nearly all of the 20-30 staff have degrees in varied fields like Psychology, Architecture and English and many were unemployed for 5-12 months before being offered a minimum wage job. I feel sorry for ANYONE unemployed but surely working in any job is better than not working at all.
Having a degree can actually work against you when applying for a retail or minimum wage job as employers do not expect you to stay for very long. Thankfully many realise that hiring graduates brings a wealth of education and experience to the workplace, and in my experience people without degrees have never actually been detrimentally affected by this. In fact, I believe none of my managers have degrees, and all of their ‘underlings’ do!”
This wasn’t quite as pedantic as the old man who once wrote in to the Daily Echo to complain because my friend, on the college basketball team, had the gall to meet the visiting Tony Blair (Prime Minister at the time) in a vest.
