Taxi!

I take too many taxis. Fifteen minutes before I am supposed to be at a meeting elsewhere in London I am still frenetically answering email. I then rush out and hail a cab. At this point I sit in a traffic jam that I would have avoided had I simply taken the tube. Either that or, after a late evening meeting in the centre of town, I succumb to idleness and exhaustion and take a taxi home to the suburbs. Consequently, I have plenty of time to chat to taxi drivers.

We talk about all sorts of stuff. London, the traffic, obviously. Occasionally, politics and world events. Mostly however, we talk about our respective lives: where we live, what we do, our families, our next holiday, our last holiday, the usual small talk. So, sooner or later the fact that I am a university Professor emerges. Sooner, if I have been picked up outside the college.

This is the point at which the cabbies will tell me about their sons and daughters. They are studying, about to go to, or just returning from,  "Uni". Nottingham Trent, Manchester Met, Sheffield Hallam, Oxford Brookes, Westminster, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, usually the 'better class' of 'post-92s'. The pride in their children is clear, discernible in the voice and the phrasing. The former meat porters, sheet metal workers, postmen, mechanics, have made it to the independence of being a London cab driver, with a house in Essex or Kent, and their offspring are taking the next steps. They are university educated. Something unimaginable a few years ago.

Graduate unemployment is high. A friend, advertising for an office junior, to file and photocopy, at near enough minimum wage, in a small office, reports three hundred graduate applicants. This is the norm. So, what is to be done? Obviously, the economy needs to get better. Perhaps however, the chatter goes, we have too many graduates. Students who are studying mickey mouse courses in the former polytechnics. We do not need them, we are raising expectations we are unable to satisfy. I know who they are referring to: not their children, not our children. It is the taxi driver's children.

I do not know the answer to the challenge of graduate unemployment. I suspect that it is about more than immediate economic conditions. Whatever the answer is however, it cannot rely on turning the clock back on equity and opportunity. No matter what the cost. The issue of access to leading or so-called 'selective' universities is a red herring. It is not about the few, it is about the many, and it is fundamentally, essentially, about the justified pride those cabbies have in their children.