DISCLAIMER: This article contains the personal views of the author and should not be inferred to be the views of Unlock Democracy.

Last Friday, readers of the London Lite may have been shocked to read the latest figures on the efficacy of university education show some degrees to be effectively useless. More worryingly, female politics graduates actually earn less than A-level students who avoid university altogether. More young people than ever will be starting university in the next few weeks and, considering the pressure they have to attend, this seems like duplicity on behalf of the political class.

Of course, the figures don’t paint a totally negative picture. In many subjects, the extra level of specialisation that a university degree provides can be a gateway to much higher earnings over the course of a lifetime. This backs up (in part) what the government claimed when they introduced tuition fees – that, if a student earns more over their lifetime, then they should be prepared to shoulder some of the costs of being provided with a degree. The same argument supposedly held fast when Blair’s majority of 161 was crushingly reduced to 5 in the top-up fees vote in the House of Commons. What was plain to some of us then was that university education really isn’t the panacea for all ills. This week’s under-reported figures are another step towards proving what was plainly obvious in the first place – the competitive advantage of some university degrees is shrinking.

So why does this matter for democracy? The problem lies in the inherent uselessness of a large number of young people and the debts that they run up. For many young people, university education effectively postpones the moment when they enter into the real world. In addition to this, by leaving university with large debts, many more young people find it hard to begin their lives properly. There can be no thought of buying a house with £15,000 worth of debt underneath you, and so fresh graduates can often look forward to another stay in their parental home in order to wipe out their debts.

These are the issues facing university graduates and is it therefore not surprising that they are not engaging with politics. The system encourages them to put off doing many of the things that will politicise an adult – getting a job, buying a home and having children. I don’t believe that young people are any less disposed towards being interested in politics than they ever were. The difference is that society encourages them to stay separate for much longer than usual. This needn’t be a bad thing, but when you discover that this enforced alienation sometimes occurs in the name of a useless degree, and therefore unnecessary debts, one might despair at the stubbornness of a political elite who assume that university education can make all people happy. I would venture to predict that if the competitive advantage continues to shrink there will be even more disengagement from politics by young people.