The Independent on the apparent overproduction of graduates:

At no time during his four-year French degree or in the three subsequent years teaching English in Japan did Paul Escott, 26, see himself working as a full-time cashier in a bookies. Paul came back to the United Kingdom last August, with a view to getting his first UK graduate job - something to match his qualifications and experience. What he found, however, was not what he was expecting.

"I never thought I'd be taking 50p bets from stoned Jamaicans," he says with a smile. "In some ways I feel like a victim of my degree." Nowadays, he says, degrees are a dime a dozen.

Escott graduated in 2000 with a French degree from the University of East Anglia (UEA), where he spent his time "treating everything as a joke". He had a great time at UEA, and says that university life was the "mutt's nuts". He says he never gave a second thought to career development. "I did any old degree I knew I could pass, without any regard for where it would lead. If I ever made my mind up about anything at university, it was that I wouldn't make my mind up," he says.

Paul is one of an increasing number of graduates who are finding that their time in higher education was worth very little when it comes to getting a job. Although he says his priorities are not financial, and that he is reluctant to spend his life on the career ladder, Paul admits that he is not now where he wants to be.

In a book published last month, Anthony Hesketh of Lancaster University and Phil Brown of Cardiff University explain why cases like Paul's are increasingly common. Their study, The Mismanagement of Talent - Employability and Jobs in the Knowledge Economy, found that the number of graduates being turned out by universities is far greater than the number of graduate jobs available.

So forget about getting a degree then, even if you can?

The authors call into question the traditional notion of a degree being a key to guaranteed career success, saying that university credentials, "do no more than permit entry into the competition for tough-entry jobs rather than entry into the winner's enclosure."

So, you still need a degree to get a top job, even though it only gets you a chance of a top job?

The crucial question is not: Does a degree guarantee you a top job? It doesn't. Not now, probably not ever. The crucial question is: Are some people more likely to get top jobs if they skip degrees and start work at eighteen, or for that matter fifteen, or twelve, or eight? If a degree is insufficient, but still totally necessary for a top job, then it still makes sense for a would-be high fligher to get one. Even that bloke in the betting office may later find that his degree pushes him ahead in the queue.

It may well be that from the point of view of the economy as a whole, "Britain" cranks out too many graduates. But that doesn't mean that individual Britons who bust their guts and their banks accounts to get degrees are necessarily behaving irrationally.

In my opinion, the crucial question for a non-degree inclined eighteen-year-old to ask is: Where is the economy expanding fastest? You are much more likely to get a top job in an industry that is exploding with new opportunities, and is hence not organised and respectable and something that regular graduates yet want to get into.

Still study, in other words, but study different stuff.

One thing's for sure. Idling your way through university, getting a silly dime-a-dozen degree, and then expecting a great career, immediately, as of right, is no longer an option - if indeed it ever was. A top career means that sooner or later you have to start, you know, working. And sooner is better.

I don't think that those authors are right to regard the view that degrees guarantee you a great career as "traditional". I think that what they say, and what I've added, is much more traditional. Degrees get you in the door, but once in there, you have to work and to work intelligently, which is likely to mean that you have got into the habit of working, and of working intelligently, and that you can prove it. And I think most people know this.