it’s a jungle out there
Right about now hundreds of thousands of nervous teenagers are packing their bags in expectation of an enjoyable and highly beneficial three or four years at university. Sold as the surest route to success where the ‘graduate premium’ can yield up to #400,000 in additional lifetime earnings, it’s viewed by many of the hopefuls as being a no-brainer. However, with the average individual student debt now standing at #53,000, the question being asked is, is it worth it? Is a university degree the golden ticket to both a financially and personally rewarding job?
The national student debt has reached a staggering #267bn and a sizeable chunk of this will never be repaid. Due to rapidly reducing numbers of entry-level roles within consultancies, large international corporates, law firms, start-ups and most general businesses, graduate opportunities are at their lowest level in seven years, and the continued development and adoption of AI technologies and techniques will only exacerbate this situation. Anecdotally, it would also appear employers are becoming increasingly cynical about the value of certain degrees. Furthermore, simple supply & demand has a huge part to play. At the beginning of the sixties only 4% of school leavers entered higher education, rising ten percent to 14% by the end of the seventies. Fifty years later, Tony Blair’s ambitious aim of 50% of young people experiencing higher education has been achieved.
Professor Duffy, director of King’s College London, argues that, whilst the graduate premium still exists, it has declined over the last decade. Each and every graduate’s earnings are affected by many related factors including relatively rigid ones such as how wealthy their family are, gender, ethnicity, where they went to school and how well they did at that school. However, some factors can be changed, specifically which university they chose and what course they opted to study. The Higher Education Statistics Agency state the somewhat bleeding obvious in highlighting many courses that offer attractive careers with high pay and scope for personal development, and some which clearly don’t. It’s a current reality that a significant proportion of students end up worse off as a result of going to uni, materially and emotionally.
Those who graduated in 2023 in medicine and health sciences, including dentistry and midwifery, reported the highest levels of satisfaction with the choice of their course, followed by architecture, computer science, civil engineering and construction. In fact, all of the top ten are strong ‘vocational’ degrees with excellent employment prospects. Those who studied journalism, marketing, social work and business studies were the most likely to regret their choice. My own choice, even though I loved it and believe I have benefitted from it every day, ranked the absolute bottom of the heap with a lowly 59% contentment level.
I fully appreciate that, to a large extent, I am ignoring the equally-important ‘learning not earning’ angle and if an individual passionately wants to read psychology at Preston Poly (aka The Central University of Lancashire) and accepts the fact that it’s unlikely to positively impact either their employment prospects or long-term salary, then good on them and on you go, but the evidence, and it pains me to say this, is that we are sending too many into further education with unrealistic expectations.
Thankfully, the solution is not rocket-science but it will have painful consequences for some, especially the overpaid Chancellors of most earnest institutions! We need fewer universities and more vocational colleges. To fuel economic growth we need to actively support what remains of our manufacturing sector with the state-funded expansion of the apprenticeships and on-the-job training schemes. Let’s have shorter degree courses that are not intentionally stretched over several years. And yes, this will mean students applying themselves more rigorously to hours more akin to a working-week. Ouch. The current student loan scheme is not-fit-for-purpose, and does eventually need to be scrapped and replaced with an easy-to-understand and easy-to-execute modestly higher rate of income tax for graduates. For life. Sorry, Rachel.
For many students, dependent upon their own decisions, application and enthusiasm, higher education can be a worthwhile, rewarding and fun experience, but the reality is that for a growing proportion the opposite is proving to be the case and they’d be better off, for all the right reasons, heading straight into the world of work. The task facing society is to provide attractive, viable options and alternatives for future generations to the often knee-jerk decision to attend university in the quest for acquiring lifetime transferable skills and abilities.
