Does it matter that Ireland’s bar staff and baristas are over-qualified? I think it does

An underachieving, overeducated class who were brought up and educated to expect more than the economy can deliver, can become a frustrated and potentially volatile constituency.

Does Ireland have the most educated bar staff and baristas in the world? The other night I got chatting to a young cocktail barman about obscure economic theory – Minsky’s “unstable equilibrium” to be precise.

Turns out, he has a master’s degree in macroeconomics and is churning out palomas quicker than our universities are churning out diplomas. Does it matter that this young lad is wildly over-qualified for the job or that the girl who served you a double espresso at your local cafe this morning has a double first from our top university? I think it does matter.

Today, Ireland has the most educated population in the European Union and has the second highest percentage of third-level education degree holders in the world. But nearly one in three degree holders work in jobs that do not require third-level education. Moreover, in a recent survey, the likelihood of Irish graduates working in high-status employment has fallen from 67 per cent in 2005 to 54.5 per cent in 2019.

If young people cannot secure jobs commensurate with their level of education, on top of the fact they are probably still living at home and can’t get homes commensurate with their expectations, their ambitions will be dashed, creating resentment.

An underachieving, overeducated class who were brought up and educated to expect more than the economy can deliver, can become a frustrated and potentially volatile constituency, one that could eventually move to destroy the status quo. Modern revolutions won’t originate from the abject poor but from the relatively rich. In Ireland, we are faced with what the biologist turned political theorist, Peter Turchin, calls “elite overproduction”.

A problem all over the West, not just in Ireland, elite overproduction occurs when a caste of educated citizens who expect to join the elite, with good jobs, prospects, salaries and status, find their ambitions thwarted by the reality that there is only so much room at the top and there are too many of them looking for a career.

According to Turchin, elite overproduction is an age-old recipe for social unrest, civil war and revolutions. When a large educated social group emerges who cannot find their place at the apex of society, they revolt. When the jobs their grandparents did are being done by immigrants, these newly aspirant professionals, the incarnation of the economic success of their parents and the product of upward social mobility, expect more. When the economy delivers less, they get angry.

In contrast to 19th century thinkers like Marx who predicted a proletariat rebellion, modern 21st century revolutions will come not from the crowded bottom but from the teeming top; not from a desperate class but from a newly created disappointed class.

When I graduated only 14 per cent of Irish people went to college. Back then, a degree was seen as a passport to upward mobility. Today, close to 70 per cent of school-leavers go to university, creating far more competition in the career market. As the premium of a basic degree becomes devalued, more and more graduates shunt into yet more education to gain access to privilege. Between 2007 and 2024, the number of Irish people enrolling for a master’s degree more than doubled from 30,000 to 66,535, an increase of 121.7 per cent. And the more masters degrees we produce, the more their value will plummet.

Not only is the middle getting crowded but, sensing the incipient competition from just below, those at the very top try to influence policies which see them garner more of society’s goodies. The result of this is that the already rich get richer – a fact evidenced by the superrich, the so-called 1 per cent, becoming out-of-sight wealthy in the past few years. This process instils even greater panic in the disenfranchised would-be elite below.

It’s a bit like a large game of elite musical chairs. Twenty years ago there were a relatively fixed number of professional or high status “chairs” – the partners in laws firms, the senior counsels at the bar, the top journalists and social commentators, the consultant surgeons, the chief executives of public companies and the like. As every year passes, more and more ambitious people come into the room expecting a chair, but when the music stops, more people are left without a chair.

The number of chairs does increase as the economy grows but nowhere near the rate of the number of expectant players. As the room becomes fuller and the amount of disappointed players expands, there will eventually be a fight over the chairs.

Before this happens the new elite will try to create more chairs where they can. An interesting indicator in Ireland of elite overproduction has been the expansion of the top of the public sector as a home for this educated elite. The private sector simply cannot absorb top graduates at the levels supplied.

Today, semi-State and public bodies account for six out of the top 10 most attractive employers for business professionals in Ireland – due to higher graduate salaries and job security in the public sector. Could it be that as elite competition soars, the higher public sector is being co-opted by the higher education sector to keep the whole show on the road? If you are looking for a canary in the elite overproduction coal mine, the migration to the senior public sector of the over-educated class might be one.

We also have emigration. In Ireland, we always have emigration. Faced with the musical chairs dilemma for jobs and houses, the over-educated children of Ireland’s middle class are on the move, again. In the year to April 2025, the CSO reports that 13,500 people left Ireland for Australia, a 27 per cent increase on the previous year and a 187 per cent increase from 2023, the highest level since 2013. For the third consecutive year, more Irish citizens emigrated than returned home. And around a third of the 35,000 emigrants in 2025 were graduate age.

In the old days, before elite overproduction, an economy with growing income and wealth, low unemployment and strong domestic demand, would have most likely delivered a big majority for the centrist parties in the Government.. Not any more.

The educated class is increasingly looking to the Left for solutions, which might be why the Left no longer seems to be worried about the poor but is more likely to agitate for what would be regarded as more bourgeois concerns.