For decades, university students in Britain have been encouraged to imagine their futures through a linear progression: go to university, secure a graduate job, build a stable income, and eventually attain the middle-class security that has long been positioned as the reward for academic effort. That model is still reproduced across university marketing, parental expectations, and government messaging. Bristol students are repeatedly told that this destination is achievable if they simply follow that path.
Recent economic conditions, however, have disrupted this narrative with the graduate labour market routinely described as precarious, and many graduates are moving abroad in search of better work-life balances. The devaluation of undergraduate degrees has pushed students across the country into master’s programmes to further their employability – with others even bypassing higher education entirely for apprenticeships or vocational routes. Even for those who follow the well-trodden academic trajectory, the economic reality now diverges sharply from the one they were promised.
Bristol students preparing to graduate are warned of these pressures in practical terms; real wages are stagnant when adjusted for housing and living costs, housing in Bristol is disproportionately expensive and the first rung of the career ladder is where fiscal drag hits hardest: small wage increases are absorbed by frozen tax thresholds, rent inflation, and student loan repayments. Students are not discouraged from working; they are discouraged from believing that work will materially improve their circumstances.
It is in this environment that the November budget lands. The core political message was that the government would not raise taxes on “working people.” The phrase appears protective and reassuring, particularly to Bristol students who expect to become early-career earners. However, how is this set to manifest? The headline tax rates on income and National Insurance did not change. Still, frozen thresholds ensure that more graduates and young professionals are drawn into higher tax bands as their salaries rise.
The use of the term “working people” enables this ambiguity; it is politically convenient precisely because it is malleable. Labour figureheads have offered a sequence of definitions: Keir Starmer initially suggested that “working people” excludes those whose incomes derive from assets such as dividends or rental property. Downing Street later softened this, implying that small asset holders should not be excluded. Rachel Reeves then widened it further, describing “people who go out to work,” before layering in distinctions based on savings. The accumulation of definitions blurs the boundary between three groups: those who depend entirely on wages, those with modest assets or savings, and those with mixed income profiles.
For Bristol students entering a system in which the definition of “working people” continually expands to justify revenue extraction while preserving the appearance of protection, the relationship between effort and reward becomes increasingly unreliable. We step into an economy that is tax-sensitive, asset-poor and deeply exposed to living-cost inflation, where a first stable salary can immediately trigger unintended fiscal thresholds, rent absorbs wage gains, and student loan repayments erode disposable income before savings can ever accumulate. The term that is supposed to signal protection for wage earners instead functions as a veneer, masking a fiscal burden that is shifting steadily onto them.
The risk here is that when early-career workers discover that career advancement does not deliver the straightforward stability they were told to expect, disillusionment follows. By using the language of protection to obscure the mechanisms of burden-shifting, it undermines young people’s trust in institutions and in the promises made to those entering the workforce. Bristol students are therefore stepping into a labour market at precisely the moment the middle ground they are incentivised to reach is being redefined, from a social aspiration to a fiscal target.
What does this say for the future of the traditional markers of security? Stable employment, modest savings, and professional wages are no longer milestones of desire, but income levels most exposed to policy extraction. Graduates are increasingly faced with a path they were encouraged to access, not only being harder to reach, but also less rewarding when there. It is therefore unsurprising that many young people seek alternatives: working abroad for better work–life balance, pursuing “get-in, get-out” wealth strategies, entering property markets in Dubai or Sydney, or experimenting with crypto, contracting, and non-linear careers. These choices are in part a response to the political decisions this government has made, which are epitomised in the November budget.
The Budget demonstrates that the political language used to reassure early-career earners, ie, what we will all be upon graduation, is the same language that justifies extracting more from them; “working people” is invoked as protection while functioning as a fiscal category to be mined. In this context, the fragmentation of graduate pathways is not only a consequence of economic insecurity but also a rational response to the erosion of trust in government.
As we prepare to embark into the world of work, it is of utmost importance that we understand the discrepancies between Reeve’s rhetoric and what the budget actually could mean for us as early-career earners.
