In 2017, almost half of Britons have received higher education by the age of 30. This is despite the fact that £9,000 worth of student fees were introduced in 2012. U.K. universities first introduced fees in autumn 1998 to address financial troubles and the fact that universities elsewhere charged tuition. Prime Minister Tony Blair introduced the goal of having half of young Britons earning a university degree in 1999, though he missed the 2010 deadline. Blair did not take into account the historical reality that an oversupply of young people with high levels of education precipitated periods of political instability and unrest in various societies, from early modern Western Europe and late Tokugawa Japan to the Soviet Union, modern Iran, and the United States. Quantitative historian Peter Turchin termed this elite overproduction. Turchin estimated that 30% of British university graduates were overqualified given the requirements of their jobs while the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) reckoned that one out of five graduates would have been better off had they not gone to university. The IFS also warned that 13 British universities risked bankruptcy as admissions fall precipitously due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Normally, admissions rise in during an economic recession as people seek to enhance their competitiveness in the workforce, but this did not happen with the one induced by the pandemic due to requirements of social distancing and the availability of online classes. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has made the case for better vocational training. "We need to recognize that a significant and growing minority of young people leave university and work in a non-graduate job," he said.