When I tell people that I do Management Tripos, the median reaction is some mixture of morbid curiosity and pity. The modal question is “Why?”

The short answer is “to get a job”. In my final year studying English, whilst doing the Tragedy Paper and muddling along with my dissertation, I applied for the usual handful of jobs (hello Fast Stream my old friend), got the usual 100% rejection rate, and began the usual panic. I applied to teach English as a foreign language about three months after the deadline, was rejected by a master’s programme (I never wanted to go to Oxford anyway) and seriously considered moving to Quebec.

In the end, nothing came of any of it. I found myself slouching towards unemployment, and would have met that fate if I had not made my last-minute handbrake turn towards business school.

“Where was this lecture when I was a fresher?”

My question is: why is this trajectory so normal? Most of my recent graduate friends are either doing a master’s, or not sure what they are doing. They do not appear to be an unrepresentative sample. According to High Flyers Research, fewer than one in three of those graduating from British universities last year did so with job offers.

There are plenty of factors one can blame for this, but there is one in particular I want to dwell on: Cambridge doesn’t do enough to help us find employment.

At the start of this year, I attended a lecture by the careers service at the business school, as a compulsory part of my course. It was full of useful gobbets, but what stood out to me was information it was already too late for me to hear. As the careers advisor sketched the pipeline from spring weeks to summer internships to graduate schemes, I realised just how many opportunities I had missed without knowing they existed. Then I thought, where was this lecture when I was a fresher, not a fourth year on borrowed time?

Most colleges and faculties are desperate to help their students excel in their studies. If you are flagging academically, your progress is monitored, plans are drawn up. Yet it is almost university policy to allow naive undergraduates to potter unprepared into the graduate job market. It is as great a dereliction of duty as if your DoS let you show up to your finals having never submitted a weekly essay, or more than skimmed a Sparknotes summary of the course reading. In fact, it is worse, because there is no grade inflation in the job market, only actual inflation, and unfortunately that doesn’t guarantee you a 2.i in employment.

That said, it would be unfair to allege that the University as a whole is indifferent to students’ prospects. Our careers service is, in my experience, excellent, and the resources they provide are extremely useful – which only makes it more egregious that students are not shoved more aggressively in their direction.

Nor can academics be blamed for not understanding a job market that they almost by definition did not enter. I am not alleging malice. The University does try, the careers service is good – and some faculties are already better at this than others. My tutors and DoS have always been nothing but kind and supportive, and have taken an interest in my future career. No one is to blame.

“Our careers service is, in my experience, excellent”

Yet still, student after student graduates into unemployment. It is tempting to think that they all find their way eventually, that the job market sorts them into the right box in the end – but markets only function efficiently when participants have perfect information. I fear that the result of not telling students the truth – that they need to start thinking about their careers at 18 – is a waste of the potential which an education here is supposed to cultivate.

So what should Cambridge do differently? I have three ideas.

First, every subject should get a lecture from the careers service in Michaelmas each year, explaining the graduate job process and offering specific advice according to subject and year. If the service needs more resources to do this job, the university should write a cheque.

Second, tutors should be given careers-focused training. They should warn students that a vague plan to go into ‘[insert relevant ludicrously competitive industry here]’ is unlikely to succeed without immense effort, and that there is no magic ‘sell out’ button to press when you graduate and start panicking. McKinsey aren’t waiting with bated breath for you to pick up the phone.

Third, academics should drop any animosity they feel towards private sector employment. I have written before about why it is wrong to think that ‘selling out’ is shameful. One of the more pernicious consequences of that view is that it discourages students from taking their employment prospects seriously until it is too late.

Cambridge’s motto is “hinc lucem et pocula sacra” – from here, light and sacred draughts. Cambridge should remember that mission, not simply to create educated people, but to send them out into the world and thus, hopefully, make it brighter.