Graduate gap year scheme won't help

Imagine my excitement when I turn on the news this morning to find the headline: "Graduates to get gap-year money". Hooray! I thought, I don't have to stay at home filling in a million forms to get Jobseekers Allowance and sift through the job websites to find something to do, I can spend a year in far off places doing valuable work for charities while beefing up the CV while I'm at it.
Then I read further into the article:

"graduates must raise £1000, buy their own flights and cover the cost of vaccinations to be eligible"

Ah.

Being a graduate coming from a low-income family this puts me off the entire scheme. After three years of borrowing money to put myself through my degree(albeit supplemented by the maintanance grant) I'm sure not even Lord Mandelson expects me to have a grand plus airfare and money for vaccinations to go on one of these expeditions, so this leads me to believe that this scheme is only going to perpetuate the assumption that all people who go on gap years are spoilt rich kids going on a jolly for a year that they can put on their CV- the only difference here being the people going on these gap years are a bit less rich so the government can subsidise them.

If the government really want to stop graduates from getting into, as NUS President Wes Streeting so eloquently put it, "the soul destroying experience of sitting at home, watching Jeremy Kyle, on the dole"(by the way, this graduate is watching Star Trek repeats on the dole, lightyears more intelligent and definitely not soul destroying!) it's got to find ways of supporting graduates that don't exclude vast swathes of them who aren't middle class and came into university as the government made a considerable effort to increase university place take up. The internship scheme is a start, but maybe instead of funding gap years for people who could probably afford them anyway if they really tried, help out both graduates and the UK's voluntary sector by giving support to get this valuable work experience in organisations in this country that are no doubt as affected by the recession as anywhere else. Maybe the government could even put me up in London to do one of those parliamentary internships I've heard so much about, but that's probably not going to happen at this rate.

So, back to the drawing board then, Mandy. I'll be doing my job searching and avoiding Jeremy Kyle.