Results Day 2026: Everybody Passed. That's the Problem.
CAYCOG | August 2026
A longer blog, but something that's been on my mind over the last week and the full duration of week away.
Last Thursday, 349,917 students opened A-level results. This Thursday, roughly half a million more open GCSEs.
If you're one of them, or you're the parent standing behind them in the hall, you've been told the same thing for five years: work hard, get the grades, go to university, get a good job. It's a clean sequence. It has one problem.
The last link snapped, and nobody updated the script.
This isn't a piece telling you university is a waste of time. For plenty of people it isn't. It's a piece telling you what the numbers actually say in August 2026, so you make the decision with your eyes open rather than on autopilot. Because the decision you make this month, at 16 or 18, carries a price tag most people don't see until they're 24 and looking at a payslip.
Part One: What actually happened last Thursday
The headline figures from the Joint Council for Qualifications:
906,425 A-level entries — a record, up 2.7% on 2025
9.6% awarded A* — the third consecutive rise
28.5% awarded A* or A, up from 28.3%
97.5% pass rate (A*–E) — effectively unchanged
262,820 UK 18-year-olds accepted onto degree courses — the highest number ever placed on results day, up 3% on last year
Read that last one again. A record number of young people are heading to university this September.
Now hold it next to a second number. UK graduate employers received an average of 140 applications per vacancy last cycle. In 2002/03 that figure was 38. Two years ago it was 86.
More graduates arriving. Fewer doors at the end. That gap is the whole story, and everything below is what happens inside it.
A few other things worth noting from the data, because they matter more than the headline:
Regional inequality widened to its largest gap since the current grading system began in 2010 — London hit 32.7% top grades, the North East and East Midlands both sat at 23.1%. If you're reading this in the North West, that gap is your context, not an abstraction.
T-Level results were up 65.1%, with 92.6% of the 19,665 students passing. Economics entries jumped 10.5%, moving it from tenth to fifth most popular A-level. That cohort was born in 2008, at the peak of the financial crisis. Make of that what you will.
Part Two: Why more degrees makes each degree worth less
Here's the mechanism, and it's not complicated.
A qualification is a signal. Its value comes from what it tells an employer that they couldn't otherwise know — and that value depends entirely on scarcity. When 5% of the population had a degree, holding one told an employer something genuinely useful. Now graduates make up roughly 42% of the UK workforce. The signal still exists. It just says far less than it used to, because almost everyone in the pile is holding it.
Employers respond predictably. When the degree stops sorting the pile, they add filters on top: a 2:1 minimum, then a Russell Group preference, then a placement year, then relevant internships, then a master's. Each filter costs the applicant more time and more money to clear. The bar moves, and the people chasing it pay for the privilege of jumping higher for the same job.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies published new estimates in June 2026 that put hard numbers on this. Working from DfE-commissioned data:
The average graduate is about £100,000 better off over their working life — £109,000 for men, £90,000 for women
In 2020, the same research team's figures were £168,000 and £126,000 in today's prices
The graduate premium didn't vanish. It shrank by roughly a third in six years. Part of that is tax and student loan policy changes — the IFS calculates 43% of the total return now goes to the Treasury rather than the graduate. The larger part is that graduate earnings simply came in below what anyone expected.
And the average conceals a lot:
A quarter of graduates can expect to be financially worse off for having gone — roughly 20% of women and 30% of men
The lowest-returning 10% of men are more than £90,000 worse off over a lifetime
Around 40% of men who went to university with lower GCSE grades end up worse off financially than if they hadn't gone
Median returns — the middle person, not the average — are £67,000 for women and £60,000 for men, dragged well below the mean by a small number of very high earners
By subject, medicine and economics return over £400,000 on average. Creative arts, philosophy and languages sit at low, near-zero, or in some cases negative average returns.
Same three years. Same debt. Wildly different outcome. And nobody puts that table on the wall at a university open day.
One honest caveat, because CAYCOG doesn't do half-truths: it would be lazy to blame all of this on "too many graduates." HEPI's analysis makes a strong counter-argument — in England, non-graduates actually face higher overqualification rates than graduates, by around 17 percentage points. The deeper problem isn't that Britain produced too many educated people. It's that Britain didn't produce enough middle-skill, decent-paying jobs to put them in, and let its technical and vocational pathways wither while the university route absorbed everyone.
That distinction matters. "Fewer people should go to university" is a lazy conclusion. "Fewer people should go to university by default, without checking the numbers, into any course that will take them" is the correct one.
Part Three: Overqualified, underpaid, and stuck there
Here's what the squeeze looks like on the ground.
CIPD research tracking three decades of Labour Force Survey data found the proportion of graduates working in low- or medium-skilled roles has doubled since 1992. Some specifics from that work:
Graduates working as bank or post office clerks: 3% → 30%
Graduates in national government administrative roles: 7% → 42%
These are not bad jobs. They are jobs that did not previously require £53,000 of debt to access, and now effectively do — not because the work changed, but because the queue did.
The cost isn't only financial:
54% of overqualified graduates report job satisfaction, against 72% of graduates whose role matches their qualification
31% of overqualified graduates say they're likely to quit within 12 months, against 9% of well-matched graduates
And the part that should worry you most: over-qualification rates stay broadly flat across every age band. This is not a rough first year that resolves itself. A poor initial match tends to become a permanent one. The "just get your foot in the door and work up" advice assumes a ladder that, for a growing share of people, isn't there.
Meanwhile the market itself has tightened hard. Graduate hiring fell 8% in 2024/25 — the first drop since the pandemic — with a further 7% forecast. High Fliers reports graduate vacancies at the top 100 employers are at their lowest level since 2012. Retail graduate recruitment is projected to fall 42.3% this year.
So: record numbers going in, and the smallest set of graduate roles in fourteen years waiting at the other end.
Part Four: The loan: where the maths genuinely stops working
Let's use someone real.
A very close friend of mine graduated in 2017 and gets paid £42,000.
That is a good salary. It's £7,000 above the average graduate salary at the UK's top employers. He is nine years into his career, doing well, and by every measure society hands out he has done this correctly.
He's on Plan 2 — the plan for anyone who started university in England between 2012 and 2023. Here are his actual terms this year:
Repayment threshold | £29,385 (then frozen to 2030) |
Repayment rate | 9% above the threshold |
Interest | Sliding scale, RPI (4.1%) up to RPI + 3% (7.1%), capped at 6% from 1 September |
Upper interest threshold | £52,885 |
Written off | 30 years after first becoming liable — for him, April 2048 |
On £42,000, he sits partway up that sliding scale, so his interest rate lands at roughly 5.7%. His balance is somewhere around £45,000 — a fairly typical position for a 2017 graduate whose debt has been compounding for nine years, including the period when rates peaked above 7%.
Now watch what happens every month.
He repays: 9% × (£42,000 − £29,385) = £1,135 a year — £95 a month
He is charged: 5.7% on £45,000 = £2,570 a year — £214 a month
He pays £95. He's charged £214. His balance grows by £119 every single month — £1,434 a year — while he does absolutely everything right.
Nine years of work. A £42,000 salary. Never missed a payment. The number gets bigger every year.
So what would he need to earn before his repayments actually cover the interest?
Because the interest rate climbs with his salary, it's a moving target — but it resolves at the 6% cap:
£59, 385. Wow.
He would need to earn over £17,000 more than he currently does — nearly £60,000 — before the balance simply stops growing. Not shrinks. Stops growing.
He has 22 years left until write-off in 2048.
Now here's what changes if you're starting this September.
You'll be on Plan 5, and on 10 August — five days ago — the Department for Education confirmed the rates that apply from 1 September:
Repayment threshold | £25,000 (frozen until April 2027) |
Repayment rate | 9% of everything above the threshold |
Interest | RPI only — 4.1% from 1 September 2026 |
Written off after | 40 years |
Tuition fee cap 2026/27 | £9,790 per year |
Average debt on entering repayment is around £47,900, with recent SLC data putting the newest cohorts closer to £53,000. Total outstanding student debt in England hit £295 billion in March 2026.
Run the same calculation on a £53,000 balance at 4.1%: £2,173 a year of interest — £181 a month.
The salary at which your repayments finally cover that?
£49,144
Your threshold is £4,385 lower than his, which means you start paying sooner. Your interest is RPI-only, which is genuinely better than his sliding scale. And your loan runs for forty years instead of thirty.
Two things I must say honestly here.
First, Plan 5 charges RPI and nothing on top. Your balance grows in cash terms but stays roughly flat in real terms — it's getting numerically larger while standing still against inflation. My friend's Plan 2 loan grows in real terms. That difference is real and it matters.
Second, both loans are income-contingent. Lose your job and you pay nothing. It never touches your credit file. It cannot be sold to a debt collector. It is not a mortgage.
But the way it genuinely bites is monthly, right when you're building a life:
A graduate on £35,000 faces a 37% marginal deduction rate — 20% income tax, 8% National Insurance, 9% student loan. A non-graduate on the identical salary faces 28%.
That's £900 a year, £75 a month. Your deposit fund. Your pension contributions. Your runway. And the government forecasts around 55% of full-time undergraduates starting in 2025/26 will repay in full — more than double the 32% forecast for the 2022/23 cohort, precisely because Plan 5 runs ten years longer and starts £4,385 lower.
The reform didn't reduce the burden. It extended it.
Part Six: What would actually fix this
Complaining is easy. Here's what a serious fix looks like, and none of it is radical.
1. Fund the missing rung. Britain's real hole isn't at degree level, it's at Levels 4 and 5 — the technical qualifications between A-level and degree that most comparable economies have and we largely dismantled. Higher technical education is where the middle-skill jobs actually connect to people. The degree is just becoming a piece of paper, valuable to the person but not others.
2. Scale apprenticeships to meet demand, not ration them. The appetite is already there — apprenticeship starts rose 11.9% to 226,620 in the first half of 2025/26, with higher apprenticeships up 23.5%. The constraint is employer places, not applicants. We are experiencing these difficulties within FE, in particular for Sport and Uniformed Protective Services. I think to fix the levy so small firms can afford to train.
3. Publish the returns data where the decision is made. Every UCAS course listing should show subject-level earnings outcomes, completion rates and employment destinations, in the same font size as the prospectus photography. If a course consistently produces negative lifetime returns, applicants deserve to know that before they commit £53,000 and three years. A dead degree means a follow up Post Graduate degree to try source work, adding additional finances and years on.
4. Cap interest at the repayment amount for lower earners. If someone earning £28,000 is making every payment they're legally required to make, their balance should not grow. That single change would remove most of the psychological damage the system causes without costing the Treasury much, given most of these balances are written off anyway.
5. Make employers justify degree requirements. 'CIPD has been saying this for years: a great many roles list a degree as a screening shortcut, not a genuine requirement.' Every unnecessary degree filter pushes another 18-year-old into £53,000 of debt for no productive reason. I've seen many jobs in football over the last decade with Essential Degrees, which are desirable by HR in the job advert- not what is needed on the grass.
6. Move careers education before Year 11. Not a results-day leaflet. Not a Year 13 assembly. Actual, funded exposure to technical routes, apprenticeships and self-employment at 13 and 14, when subject choices are still live.
Worth noting: the new government has signalled movement here. Andy Burnham, who became Prime Minister in July, pledged during his leadership campaign that "the days of a school system configured entirely around the university route will be brought to an end." Whether that becomes policy is another question — but the direction of travel is being acknowledged at the top.
Part Seven: What to do this Thursday
If you're collecting GCSEs on 20 August:
Grade 4 in English and maths is the gate everything else runs through — sixth form, college, apprenticeships, most employers. In 2025, the English Language pass rate was 59.7% and maths 58.2%. If you missed one, you are in extremely normal company. Resits run in November with results in January, and your higher grade always stands — there is no downside to trying again.
Then choose your post-16 route on evidence, not on what your mates are doing:
A-levels if you're academically strong and heading for a degree with a real return
T-Levels if you want technical depth with a substantial industry placement — 92.6% passed this year and the route is expanding fast
BTEC and other VTQs — 300,005 results were awarded across 421 qualifications this year, in Business, Administration and Law more than any other sector
An apprenticeship if you'd rather be paid to learn than pay to learn
Keep maths if you can. Numbers don't lie. It remains the most-taken A-level, entries are up 20% over five years, and it opens more doors than any other single subject.
If you're holding A-level results:
If you've got a place on a course with strong returns at a good institution — go. Take it. This article is not telling you to walk away from a genuine opportunity.
If you're going through clearing, remember it runs until 19 October. You are under no obligation to take a place simply because it's available at 2pm on a Thursday. A place you grabbed in a panic still costs £9,790 a year. Some courses will naturally fill up before others, so bear that in mind.
Look seriously at degree apprenticeships. Average starting salary around £24,000, no tuition debt, a degree at the end and three years of real experience your graduate competitors won't have. Level 6 remains fully funded — note that government funding for Level 7 was restricted in January 2026 to under-22s and certain other groups, so target Level 6. A successful route for my brother, where his employer funded a full BA Hons Degree, a salary and remission to complete his studies.
And deferring is a legitimate strategic decision, not a failure. A year working, earning and figuring out what you actually want beats three years and £53,000 spent finding out you didn't want it. You are going to be 19, 29, 39 years old anyway, so what does another year matter?
Part Eight: The option nobody writes on the whiteboard
There's a third option in that hall, and almost no teacher points at it.
I do. But then, that's the entire reason CAYCOG exists.
You can build something.
Put it beside the alternative honestly — and let's keep using the real case from Part Four rather than a convenient invention.
My friend is nine years past graduation. He earns £42,000, he has never missed a payment, and his balance still grows by £119 every month. Add the three years he spent at university and that's twelve years of his adult life in which that number has only ever got bigger. It will keep getting bigger until roughly £59,385, and it doesn't disappear until 2048.
Now picture someone who spent those same three years building something instead.
Twelve years on, they carry no student debt. They hold a decade of trading history. They made every expensive mistake early, when the mistakes were cheap and nobody was depending on them. And they own an asset rather than a liability — if it worked, something with a sale value; if it didn't, commercial judgement acquired at 21 that most people don't get until 35. This person more than likely still lives at home, responsibility free and can afford to make the mistakes at this point of their life, agree?
None of this makes my friend a wake up call. He earns well, he's good at what he does, and he'd probably make the same decision again. The point isn't that he chose wrong. It's that at 18 he was only ever shown one door, and nobody sat him down with the arithmetic first.
Now the honest half, because CAYCOG doesn't sell fantasies. Most new businesses don't survive five years. Self-employment is volatile, unglamorous, and frequently pays badly before it pays well. It is not a guaranteed better outcome, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you a course.
What it is, is an option, with a completely different risk profile that almost nobody presents to a 16 or 18-year-old as a serious plan — and the barriers are far lower than you've been told:
Registering as a sole trader is free
The £1,000 trading allowance lets you earn that much before you even declare it (late teens have experienced this for sure with Vinted and Depop generating some extra summer cash)
You don't register for VAT until turnover hits £90,000 (when you get to this point, the accountant will most likely take over)
Most viable service businesses start under £2,000 — a fraction of one year's tuition.
What kills young businesses isn't a lack of qualifications. It's a lack of a customer, a lack of cash discipline, and nobody around who's done it before to shorten the learning curve. All three are solvable, I want to help. One thing to note on this point is, don't expect your friends and family to support, but for sure when they do, will want discounts or freebees.
Part Nine: One last thing, for the ones who are going anyway
Let's say the quiet part out loud.
A lot of you aren't choosing university. Your parents are choosing it for you, or nobody has ever actually asked you what you want, so it's chosen by default. I see it in students every single year. It is completely normal — and it is the most expensive form of politeness.
So if you're going, go properly. Pick something you're good at and genuinely interested in. Not because passion pays the bills on its own — Part Two has the subject-by-subject numbers and some of them are brutal — but because nobody in history has ever got a First in a subject they resent. And the class of your degree matters more than people admit.
If postgraduate study is where you're heading, the 2:1 is the gate — but go in with your eyes open. A master's carries its own loan at up to 6% interest, repaid at 6% of everything above £21,000, running alongside the undergraduate loan you're already paying. For some careers that's an obvious yes, a Teacher or Doctor. It is not an automatic upgrade, and it is definitely not a way of postponing the decision.
Then use the three years.
Not the loan — don't borrow more than you need. Plan 5 runs for forty years and over half of you are now forecast to repay in full, which means for the first time in a decade, extra borrowing genuinely costs extra money.
But the time, and everything attached to it. You will never again have this much cheap accommodation, free wifi, a library, free legal and business advice, software licences worth thousands, a careers service, and fifteen thousand potential customers living within a mile of your bed. Especially seeing the growth here in Salford and Manchester. Students who build things build them in the gap between the money they were given and the lifestyle they decided not to have.
Times are different from when our parents and grandparents were in this boat. Most people now run two careers, two jobs, or two hobbies in parallel. That's simply what a working life looks like now.
Just don't support two football teams. Everything else, you'll be fine.
Where CAYCOG comes in
Pressure is a privilege, a line you will be familiar of if you have read my earlier blogs. Results day is pressure. So is deciding what to do next when the sequence you were sold has visibly stopped working. Both are privileges, because both mean you've got a decision to make and the capacity to make it well.
I built CAYCOG for exactly this gap. Specifically:
Free business plans and startup guides for anyone with an idea and no capital. No catch, no card details. If you're 16 with a plan and no money, that's who this is for.
A free 30-minute consultation — bring the idea or bring the confusion, both are fine.
The Community — weekly tasks, resources and people building at the same time as you, so you're not doing it in isolation.
The Academy Programme — structured 1:1 coaching for people who are serious about running something properly.
The Gifted & Talented Programme — Important to note that this will start in 2027* however, a two-day hands-on entrepreneurship, brand-building, sales and pitching programme for schools, colleges, universities. If you're a teacher or head of sixth form reading this in results week, this is the conversation to have in your plans for the next 12 months.
Nobody at CAYCOG will tell you university is a mistake. I went and worked out pretty successful, I think? Plenty of people should go, and the ones who go into the right course at the right place with their eyes open do very well.
The world has changed.
The economy has changed.
The needs of the public have changed.
Businesses have changed.
If you don't adapt, you will get left behind.
What we will tell you is this: it is the single largest financial decision most people make before they're 30, they make it at 17, with incomplete information, under enormous social pressure, and almost nobody shows them the numbers first.
Now you've seen the numbers. Whatever you choose on Thursday — choose it, don't default into it.
Get in touch: cathal@caycog.org | 07732 740 639
Book a free consultation: caycog.org/services Follow: @caycogltd
Sources
Joint Council for Qualifications, National Results 2026
UCAS results day statistics, 13 August 2026
Institute for Fiscal Studies, New estimates of the impact of undergraduate degrees on lifetime earnings, June 2026
CIPD, What is the scale and impact of graduate overqualification in the UK? · HEPI, Is England really the world champion in overqualification?
Institute of Student Employers, Student Recruitment Survey 2025
High Fliers Research, The Graduate Market in 2026
House of Commons Library, Student loan statistics and Apprenticeship statistics for England
Student Loans Company, Student Loans in England: Financial Year 2025-26
DfE, Explore Education Statistics
Thanks for reading.
CAYCOG
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