‘Education, education, education” was the rallying cry of Tony Blair before history cruelly teamed him up with George W Bush. We all applauded – and, to be fair, the money flowed during the Blair-Brown years, even if it was accompanied by intrusive “modernisation”. For higher education, the equivalent mantra would have been – and still is – “jobs, jobs, jobs”.

Students – sorry, customers – are now cajoled into measuring the value of their courses in terms of future earnings. High tuition fees in England, soon to be higher still even though they are already among the highest in the world, are justified by these higher graduate earnings.

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And it is not only students. Institutions, too, have to focus on “employability”, usually reduced to the proportion of their students who find “graduate” jobs. In the looming Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) this will be a key indicator of their performance.

Whole nations now justify public investment in higher education almost entirely in terms of enhancing the skills of graduate workers, as well as more “impactful” research. Competition in the global knowledge economy is the new Olympian struggle, with growth rates and gross national product substituting for medals.

But just because over the past two decades the growth in the proportion of “graduate” jobs roughly kept pace with the increasing production of graduates there is no guarantee this will happen in future. The recent Institute for Fiscal Studies report found that the “graduate premium”, the extra earnings graduates can expect compared with non-graduates, has held up – so far. It offered no reassurances about the future.

Because older non-graduates are retiring and being replaced by graduates, the proportion of graduates in the workforce will go on increasing even if there is no growth in student numbers (and the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service has reported a 4% increase in first years this autumn).

There is already alarming anecdotal evidence that the increase in “graduate” jobs is failing to keep pace. Lots of graduates end up in the Uber economy. In any case, the “graduate premium” has always been uneven – high for Oxbridge graduates heading for the City, wafer-thin for those from less prestigious universities working in the public sector (especially if they are women or from ethnic minorities).

Ministers will be tempted to heap blame on these less prestigious universities, naming and shaming them and penalising them in the TEF in the name of “driving up standards”. But that will be pointless and deeply unfair if the “graduate” jobs don’t exist in sufficient quantity. It is worth remembering that the growth in such jobs in the past was fuelled by incorporating the education of most healthcare and primary school teachers into the graduate economy.

The anecdotal evidence that the explosion of “graduate” jobs may be over is already there. The scientific evidence is slowly becoming available, notably in a paper by Stephen Kemp-King, The Graduate Premium: manna, myth or plain mis-selling?, published by the Intergenerational Foundation. There are lots of reasons. Top of the list is the government’s refusal to embrace a high-skill industrial strategy, preferring the quick fix of a liberalised, and lower-wage, workforce.

Another reason is that many of the “graduate” jobs generated in management and financial services, even though they are filled by graduates from our now ubiquitous “top” universities, are rather “soft”. They may – may – demand those sometimes over-hyped problem-solving and inter-personal skills. But they often don’t need high-level expert and technical skills. Not really very “graduate” on one reading.

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Then there are longer-term structural reasons. Some fear high-skill jobs are being hollowed out, as the need for truly advanced skills is becoming more and more concentrated in a few very high-tech sectors (often abroad). Others suggest our existing advanced technologies are becoming mature, and may cease to devour graduates in the way they once did.

If the graduate job market does falter, there are two responses. The first, and much the most likely from government, is to increase the pressure on universities, insisting that the fit between higher education and employment becomes even more exact. That is probably a battle that can never be won.

The second is to recognise that a higher education is about more than jobs. It is about self worth and citizenship too. So even if the supply of “graduate” jobs does fail to keep up with the production of graduates, there is no need to panic. A good society is more than just an ever-expanding economy.