A university education doesn’t have to lead to a lifetime of debt. There is another way | Sonia Sodha

Degree apprenticeships and subsidised housing can save the young from narrowed existences

Fifty years ago, the average 24-year-old would have been married, living with their partner, and probably already a parent. Census data out last week shows that today they’re probably still living with their parents.

Welcome to the modern phenomenon dubbed “stretched adolescence”. It’s a term that hints at baby boomers unable to quite get their twentysomethings to leave the parental home. But this is to confer a ludicrous degree of agency on the zoomer generation. They are not choosing a Peter Pan lifestyle: the straitjacket is imposed on them by harsh economic realities. Who really wants to live with their parents into their late 20s, struggling to save a deposit to rent, let alone buy?

Yet those with a childhood bedroom they can continue to live in for no, or subsidised, rent while working in a job with prospects are the lucky ones. How many of these under-25s are trapped living in a place where the only work available is low paid, with few opportunities for development and progression?

Intergenerational inequalities are so often framed as a grim economic equation. If the price of a supermarket chicken had risen at the same rate as house prices since the 1960s, it would today cost more than £50: rising house prices have delivered a huge windfall to owners at the expense of renters, who pay some of the highest rents in Europe.

The average graduate leaves with tens of thousands of pounds of debt that they will end up paying back for most, if not all, of their working lives; changes introduced last autumn mean that average-earning graduates will end up paying significantly more, while the highest earners will pay less. Factor in the increasing taxes they will have to pay to meet the costs of an ageing population, and how on earth are zoomers supposed to contribute to the pensions that will in any case pay out at much stingier rates than what retired boomers enjoy today?

These headlines don’t begin to capture the extent of what we are asking more young people to give up. Those years of mad social experimentation in your first home in your early 20s; the security of knowing you don’t have to move your kids every couple of years when your tenancy comes up; the guarantee of somewhere you can afford to live in retirement; not having to combine the impossible task of full-time working and caring if your parent gets dementia. All things that are being pulled away from this generation, save for the most comfortable slice at the top, who will be able to rely on family wealth. The cushioning effects of this wealth will multiply over time, so who your parents are will matter more, not less, to where you end up in life.

Chin-stroking about the right level for tuition fees or a bit of extra help for first-time buyers in their late 30s that pushes up prices even further for everyone else; the solutions proffered by politicians, even the Labour party, are but tinkering. The world has changed dramatically; so too must the offer for young people.

There are a couple of ideas from the past that with updating could help address the crisis. The housing market needs fundamental fixes to bring prices down: a painful readjustment that will take years. But there is a way of making an almost immediate difference to young people. In the 1970s, flats were cheaper, but access to mortgages was relatively restricted; women even needed a male guarantor. In order to open up jobs in the capital to a wider pool of young people from across the country, big employers like the civil service, the post office and the BBC funded hostels for single people in their early 20s.

Why can’t the government embark on a modern version of this, building and converting properties in jobs-rich and high-cost areas into student halls-type accommodation? They could be made available at an affordable capped rent, with some places reserved for young people from areas of the country where the labour market opportunities are limited, and could even include light-touch pastoral support. This could dramatically extend economic opportunities for some young people, and make a transition to adulthood in supported and subsidised communal living possible for those young people who don’t go away to university and are left to muddle through themselves.

The model of undergraduate education is broken: a system whose justified expansion has happened at the expense of young people incurring huge debts, sometimes only to get jobs you wouldn’t have needed a degree for a few decades ago.

The data doesn’t exist to find out if the skills developed while studying for a degree – as opposed to the degree certificate you need to get in the door with many employers – are worth these sums. In contrast, degree apprenticeships allow young people to earn and learn simultaneously, getting a degree in three years without incurring any debt while building skills in real workplaces. But there are just 30,000 degree apprenticeships available every year – most of which are taken up by over-25s rather than school leavers – compared with more than half a million places on traditional undergraduate courses.

If you were going to redesign post-18 education so it worked for young people – not universities – you would vastly increase the number of degree apprenticeships and get more universities to work with employers to offer them. That might result in fewer English and history degrees, and more vocational degrees in areas from law to nursing to tech development; but does that matter? I bet that if more quality degree apprenticeships were available – with a similar accommodation offer to traditional degrees – young people would vote with their feet.

We have a history of great postwar government innovation in the UK: the creation of the NHS; the postwar expansion of council housing; the “University of the Air” dream that became the distance-learning model of the Open University. Subsidised homes for rent for young people and a huge expansion of degree apprenticeships are not beyond the wits of the state. But while politicians play in the weeds, things can only get worse.

It is hard to exaggerate the life-limiting consequences this lack of political action will have for a generation for whom things are going to be tougher than for their parents.

• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist

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Sonia Sodha

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