An out-of-work Oxbridge graduate has openly admitted in a national newspaper that they used benefits money to fly out to Australia – in a seeming bid for sympathy.
This week, the Times published an article titled ‘Meet the Oxbridge graduates who can’t get a (good) job’, in which five former Oxbridge students wrote about their struggles finding employment after graduating.
In the piece, one Oxford graduate, 23-year-old Kate Bunn, recalled how she had struggled to find any work in media or publishing after graduating with a “nice 2:1 in French and German.”
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She wrote: “My northern grammar school sixth form was straight out of The History Boys, complete with a small group of bright young things going for Oxbridge. I opened my results in the Old Hall before my elated parents. The world was my oyster, and I wanted to gobble it up, shell and all.”
Bunn went on to say that she almost “went back to the seaside café I worked at from the age of 16 to 20, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.” So she signed on.
And when her first benefits claim came through, what did she do? Booked flights to Australia.
“I updated my work journal daily,” she wrote. “I spoke to a lovely lady on the phone about how to write a CV, and was told to attend a meeting a week at the job centre.
“A fellow Oxonian and friend, wonderfully bronzed after a year travelling, asked if I’d like to join him at his grandparents’ house in Perth, Australia. I agreed. I could apply for jobs from white sand beaches instead of from Cleethorpes.
“My benefits claim came through. £300. I booked the flights.”
And after some hospitality work, hiking and an unpaid internship, she returned home, where she is still yet to find full time work.
It’s safe to say that sympathy was in short supply for Bunn online, with one person writing: “Can I just say on behalf of taxpayers everywhere how delighted I am to have been able to prevent this young lady from having to debase herself by working in a café and instead buy international air tickets.”
As you might be able to imagine, the rest of the article carries on in a similar vein, with other Oxbridge grads complaining about how their “scattergun approach” to job searching, shockingly, didn’t bear fruit or admitting they actually don’t even want a job.
And one of the grads in the piece even admitted to ghostwriting other students’ university applications “through a dodgy agency website.”