ABSTRACT
With the onset of the post-industrial age, governments and political parties of all kinds across the OECD declared that the universities were now the principal means of upward social mobility. That was a fiction. 1 In 2012 more than 30 percent of young Australians went to university. But there were not graduate jobs for all of them or even for a majority of them. The majority had to be content with employment in retail, hospitality, and services. These were not jobs in the professions, let alone the learned professions. The promise of the post-industrial universities was that these institutions were a gateway to the high professions. For a minority of students this was true. For the rest this was spurious. Eight percent of jobs are in the learned professions like medicine, law, and engineering. A further 8 percent are in the associate professions like nursing and social work. This is a social ratio of long standing. It is persistent and unlikely to change.
