Fun with Numbers 7.

So the gov want 50% of young people to go to university right. In time that will be 50% of all of us i.e. around 35 million. Now currently there are 29 million employed so that would leave 6 mil graduates unemployed with no hope of paying off their student loan. At £30,000 each that’s £180 billion debt for the gov to cover. And if the graduate Class of ’08 is anything to go by a good percentage of the other 29 mil employed graduates will be behind a Blockbuster counter in Wolverhampton on min wage so they’ll only be paying back a shilling a week. And as most of us will pair up and produce kids at some point, which take a fair amount of looking after, I’d guess around 40% wouldn’t pay off much of their loan. That’s another 14 mil and £420 billion. Total £600 billion the gov will have to cough up to pay off unpaid student loans. Of course that’s over a fair few years but it’s still a lot of money. Even so it will lead to 20 million graduates either unemployed or in demoralising jobs; rather disappointing when you were led to believe a degree would be your key to a comfortable middle class existence. It’s rather like building a four-lane motorway to a back street in Solihull. Now I’m not an expert in traffic management but I’m fairly sure that would lead to road rage of epidemic proportions. It’s all about flow as in 7 trickles make a stream, 15 streams make a river and so on. But here’s the difficulty: It’s easy to give students loans because most will graduate and the gov will appear successful in achieving its objective, but funding industry and creating employment is a dastardly difficult thing to do without getting egg on your face. It takes a vast amount of industrial knowledge, experience, foresight and management skills that the gov don’t have. So a failed investment in industry of several million will provide a glaring example of their incompetence whereas losses of several billion in unpaid student loans will appear the successful meeting of targets, they all got a degree didn’t they? It’s like Tom Leira’s line, “Vonce za rokets are up who cares vere zy come down, zats not my department says Verna Von Brown.”