“In many parts of the country the graduate earnings premium is negative – these local economies are unable to absorb or properly use higher qualified people because of the structure of the local economy.”
– From this essay, “Levelling up: against just “cities and skills”, by Neil O’Brien, who I think is the Conservative MP of that name. I found the link via the trade unionist Joe Allen.
Though I salute Mr Allen’s open-mindedness in linking across the political aisle, I would like to make one observation with which he probably – and his employer the TUC certainly – disagrees: to whit, the fact that there are parts of the country where going to university on average makes a young person poorer is yet another argument against rent control.
Again and again I see the argument that, far from it being a problem that landlords are being driven out of the rental market, it is a fine thing, because landlords selling up will make more homes available. “Home” is a beautiful word, but there are and always will be people who are not looking for a permanent home. Some of this group are students, obviously, alongside those in temporary jobs, those whose work requires them to move frequently – and those who have a choice between staying at home where their degree is useless or moving to some place where it isn’t. A strong rental market allows rural people to try out life in the city, and vice versa for city people. In a society where landlordism is banished and every house is a home, you had better pray that the waiting list to leave your quaint village is exactly equal in length to the waiting list to join it.
Especially in some non-urban areas, I can understand how having an advanced degree in Purple-Haired Inuit Womyns’ Studies would not be the automatic sinecure that one might expect.
But a rent-frozen society is not a very mobile society.
Don’t forget the people that can’t get a mortgage. The ones that pay £550pm for rent but lenders say can’t afford a £350pm mortgage.
Good point from Lord T.
But i wanted to remark on another fact: there are some graduate jobs which allow telecommuting. To do this kind of job, you need not live in expensive city housing: you might as well live in the sticks and save money. If your employer lets you do so; otherwise, maybe you can freelance.
This is seen in many African and Latin American countries – there are many people with university degrees who demand jobs in the bureaucracy, because working with their hands is, somehow, beneath them.
It is also, increasingly, seen in the “advanced” West.
Several years hearing and repeating back semi Marxist claptrap (to get a degree) is, somehow, held to entitle people to a higher income and better conditions of work.
But owning a home isn’t just the £350pm mortgage, there’s everything else that rent covers, the building insurance, the repairs and maintainance, fixtures and fittings, etc. etc.