What do you say to a graduate with a first class degree in gender studies?

If your answer was “I’ll have that with a large fries and a McFlurry and an extra large Coke, sweetheart,” I’d seriously question your judgement.

What kind of self-respecting employer, let alone one of the world’s leading fast-food emporia, would be so blinkered and self-destructive as to give a valuable job to someone whose only training consisted of whiny self-pity, resentment, divisiveness, navel-gazing, and entitlement?

Sorry gender studies graduates, but there it is. And the same goes, I’d say, for about 90 per cent of the other graduates from 90 per cent of the courses at 90 per cent of universities in Britain (and beyond): you’ve wasted your time; you’ve been sold a pup; you’ve borrowed all that money on the basis of a false prospectus. Employers just aren’t interested in your crappy degree.

And it’s not just me saying this. It’s a report from the House of Lords economic affairs committee.

According to the Daily Telegraph:

The House of Lords’ economic affairs committee has called for an overhaul of the “deeply unfair” higher and further education system. The UK has a “skills mismatch” and “there are particular shortages of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills at technician level, but an oversupply in other areas, such as biological science graduates,” according to the National Audit Office. As a result, “the oversupply of some graduate-level skills, and the undersupply of technician-level skills, could result in graduates occupying technician-level roles for which they are overqualified and under-skilled,” a report, published today, says. This, in turn, can lead to “low morale and high staff turnover” for businesses.

As Charles Moore explains later in the paper, this is largely the fault of Tony Blair – still not properly recognised, though one day he surely will be, as among the most destructive and insidiously dangerous prime ministers in British history.

Blair, it was, who decided that what Britain needed was more graduates.

In 1999, he said:

“Today I set a target of 50 per cent of young adults going into higher education in the 21st century”

This was a drastic increase on the 5 per cent of young adults who went to university in the 1960s.

But like so many of Blair’s headline-catching initiatives it was all eyewash.

Dramatically increasing the number of kids in further education does not make a country cleverer or, necessarily, its people better suited to high powered jobs.

It simply means that are many more thick people at university who would have been much better going to straight to work after school, or doing some kind of apprenticeship, but who instead have wasted three years of life racking up thousands in debt and who enter the real world with grotesquely inflated delusions of intellectual adequacy and a sense of entitlement which the jobs market is quite incapable of satisfying.