Britain’s top jobs - and who gets them - are controlled by a small number of universities, stifling diversity in the workplace, according to Euan Blair, chief executive of apprenticeship company Multiverse.
Speaking at the Evening Standard’s SME XPO event in London on Wednesday, Blair, the son of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, said degrees had been used as a “filtering mechanism” at the expense of hiring the best people.
“When you really boil it down, essentially we’ve allowed the top jobs in the labour market, and who takes those top jobs, to be determined by a small group of academic institutions.
“That’s hugely problematic for society - It has helped embed inequality into the labour market,” he said.
Only 4% of people claiming free school meals go on to a Russell Group university, he said, leading to a lack of social mobility in tech and professional services.
Multiverse trains apprentices to place with employers in the UK and US in areas such as business operations to data science and software engineering and bills itself as an alternative to university.
It recently secured funding from firms such as Morgan Stanley, Amazon and Deloitte to train 5,000 apprentices for charities and small businesses which would otherwise be unable to afford to take them on.
“I think the thing that is increasingly important to big companies and small companies is accessing diverse talent and getting the skills they need,” Blair said.
“Over half of the apprentices we place are people of colour, about a third come from most economically marginalised communities, and 54% are women, including in tech roles.”
Employers’ attitudes are changing, he said.
“They’ve traditionally focused on hiring from universities because they assumed that was the only way to reach great talent. They now increasingly realise it’s not.”
He called on the government to incentivise schools to promote apprenticeships alongside the traditional university route, to overhaul school league tables to show outcomes other than exam results, and to remove barriers to accessing apprenticeships such as grade requirements.
He said his own degrees - in ancient history and international relations - had been “absolutely useless” in his graduate job at investment bank Morgan Stanley.
