to be surprised that the numbers attending university aren't declining yet?

[Toadinthehole]

OK, so a generation ago, the vast majority of people did no tertiary study at all. It was possible to leave school at 16 and achieve what was considered a perfectly decent job (if you were male). As those who did go to university received a grant from the State, which also paid their tuition fees, the only individuals who paid for education were parents of children at private schools. This was the norm across most Western countries.

Skip forward to now. Certain trades excepted, it is now nigh on impossible to get a job with prospects unless one has spent at least 3 years at university running up a big debt. Societies across the Western world now expect people to pay to get a sufficient education to make their way in society. While schools have not necessarily got worse, a school education by itself is now manifestly inadequate for this. There is little planning to ensure enough people enter the right degree disciplines. Universities have become huge yet underfunded. Millions find their degree discipline does not enable them to find work: others find they have chosen the wrong profession and have to start all over again or, if they're lucky, obtaining work in the modern equivalent of the factory: the dreaded call centre, Hanging over them is the sword of student debt. In just over a decade, my children will have to face all this.

It is a complete mug's game, yet according to recent reports, the number of people continuing to enter higher education continues to increase? Why is there no obvious alternative?

Hello Toad, i am a great fan of the modern apprenticeship which gives the person practical training in a trade, funded by commerce/industry, not the state and sometimes funded Uni courses, while earning a basic wage.

I believe there is a need to completely redesign education for 21st century. The internet could provided some aspects of FE/HE as an affordable alternative, combined with top up mentoring and land-based education coming from the traditional uni facilities, but reducing the size of those institutions to more affordable levels. When considered that only a small % of the under-grad's time is spent in lecture halls, it is becoming increasingly unviable and unaffordable to pay £30k for that privilege!

This is based on research Im currently doing, so you may find that things will have changed by the time your DCs need to decide their HE options.

Gary

I'm in NZ (hence 3 AM, although I do worry for my children!). The reason why one has to be a graduate to get a halfway decent office job is because there are so many graduates. Where these jobs do not require specific university study (engineering, for example) the same people would be able to do the work just as well with no degree. My view is that it makes no sense either for these people, or the economy in general, to take degrees. It only benefits the universities whose business is increasingly to sell bits of paper with magic words written on them.

Daisy

Do you think what you suggest is likely to come to pass?

I bet somewhere in establishment there's this thought process going...

• keep them out of unemployment queue
• keep them learning to be independent
• let them pay for above two so the state saves money and it has additional income and creates jobs in Higher Education

toad I think the whole model for education will change because of the need to cater for 21st century, technology usage (the internet, mobile computing). People can learn very differently nowadays, your DCs generation have grown up 100% surrounded by technology so they will expect their educators to use it to a greater extent.

Already there is a greater push towards global education using social media networking with Massive Open Online Courses. MOOCs wont stay free forever but they could change how people educate themselves. People will become more independent in their learning, not sitting in a classroom having information thrown at them.

People are developing digital literacies, through better education, so can sift out good quality from the dross selectively on the internet.

All these things are happening now, as we speak. Governments will be watching for when the tipping point will occur and will be forced to change the focus away from formulaic assessment and exam nonsense which was fine for the 19th century, but not in our post-industrial information Age. New ways of credentialling are being developed now, that are much more person-centric not one size fits all. Industry will have to change their mindset about how they recruit and what skillsets are important and how to evidence competence.

Lots happening, I just hope it develops in time for your DC, 10 years is a short time in education, which is society's sector that is most immune from real change, even though Governments tinker round the edges and frustrate educators!

In my experience this is not helped by the fact that nowadays employers often make having a degree a requirement for roles which, in reality, there is no need for. I think it's lazy to essentially just use it as a way to screen CVs and a shame as you risk overlooking people who are just as capable, but, for whatever reason, didn't go to university. I've lobbied long and hard at my workplace to remove this requirement from the job specifications of certain roles, preferring to focus on someone's experience in the field or, for ' entry level' roles, using their covering letters to assess their suitability for the role.

I'll go chuck my 5 years master's in Engineering which was essential to work in my particular field in the bin then. OP, what do you think Engineering is?

Back to your main point...

In the UK degrees are actually now cheaper at 'point of use' than they were when I started uni some 15 yrs ago. The loan system defers most of the cost until you're in a position to pay it back and the thresholds for this have been raised considerably. According to the stats, a large number of people will have the debt written off before its paid back in full.

I do agree with you that some degrees are overkill and would like to think that people would reflect on this.and maybe the type of courses people are studying will adapt over time. I also think there are some who.do enabling courses which are required for certain.careers and others who do a course because it interests them. The latter is fine, though those in this position need to be realistic about what it will offer them i.e. a degree in ancient Latin may have a handful of specific career options but most graduates will need to focus on what transferable skills they have gained.

FWIW, I had a number of friends who went to university when they shouldn't have and they freely acknowledge this. It's not that they weren't clever enough (they are) but that they didn't really know why they did it. Just caught up in the sausage machine of 'everyone must have a degree'.

No, everyone should not have a degree, everyone should have the opportunity to have a degree, irrespective of income, background etc.

most graduates will need to focus on what transferable skills they have gained

tbh you can only asses what you really need in workplace if you are there! hence chartered exams and many of ppl my age did them without having gone to uni

it looks to me like most graduates are there for building communication skills for most ability to write, comprehend, execute logic etc is a learned skill, what workplace used to teach, now is done by unis (cheaper to the business owners)

in the past when much smaller number of people went to uni they had those skills and were expected having them by their lecturers, were those skills present because of their personality and ability to learn very fast when required etc

so over all businesses are better off for having better educated workforce, but they contribute much less to education of those workers

obviously lots of jobs need the technical background etc but if you look at 1-2 year long master conversion courses - they give you good indication which skills really can be taught on the job - what I mean is like I did 1 year full-time Msc in Computer Science after doing undergraduate/masters in Horticulture. I didn't go into much depth in each course we covered. Just enough to carry on an ongoing self-education which I carry on to this day over a decade later. It is necessary as technology changes so fast!

I am all for people delaying university to understand what really interests them and to find one which fills in gaps they have.

In the UK degrees are actually now cheaper at 'point of use' than they were when I started uni some 15 yrs ago. The loan system defers most of the cost until you're in a position to pay it back and the thresholds for this have been raised considerably. According to the stats, a large number of people will have the debt written off before its paid back in full. - I am seeing additional 21-29K to pay to what ppl your/mine generation didn't have to pay as as a tax by the government.
This logic - is OK to make them pay because they won't pay anyway - is wrong. I can't work out why....

lastnight

A brief point of clarification. I am not suggesting that tertiary study should be abolished. Engineering is one of a number of professions where formal study will clearly be necessary. There are other examples: medicine, the sciences, perhaps law, and so on. Most jobs do not require comparable technical knowledge, hence it should not be necessary for a person to have a degree to get them.

The point about student loans does explain why the numbers entering university continues to increase, however, my view is this remains a bad thing. The loan has to be repaid unless the time taken to study (in most cases to improve one's prospects) turns out to have been completely wasted.

no, law doesn't belong to the same category, in fact this year is first when there are Apprenticeships for entering law as A-level students via law firms
apparently long awaited improvement according to our in house lawyer

I think being a lawyer requires gaining skills which can be learned on the job. In fact many lawyers come from different uni courses to law and then just go on conversion courses.

I tend to agree. I am a lawyer myself. Qualifying as a lawyer in NZ requires taking an LLB, which requires 4 years of purely academic study - plus an extra half year for the minority who take honours. Half a decade! My specific line of work makes some use of all the law I learned in this time - but I could probably have covered what I needed in 1 or 2 years. I wouldn't have needed any of it had I ended up working in dull, boring property law.

Far more sensible for training to be through articles, with Masters courses for those who want to specialise after having worked in the profession for a while.

Aren't you rather begging the question of whether people go to university because they think they'll learn things that'll be useful in their future jobs?

I didn't - I did a degree I thought would be interesting (it was) and hugely enjoyed the experience. It was also a really useful stepping stone to proper independence.

I'm a lawyer too by the way, completely agree you don't need a law degre. Not having one certainly never held me back anyway!

I do agree with this. Atm I'm doing an admin job many of my colleagues have degrees and masters even a PhD. I don't.

I have been looking another job and saw one advertisedfor aadministration where you needed 2 years experience and a degree to earn the princely sum of £14,000 a year. Just over nmw.

It's insane. So many people have degrees now, that they can offer jobs at just above nmw that requires no real skill, just for graduates. What about those who don't have a degree?

Because capitalism has pushed down the price of labour, and employers which in the past offered long-term permanent jobs and were willing to train and invest in their employees now want a flexible workforce who come already trained so they don't have to pay or bother do it. Young people know this and fear being left behind, hence the rush to university.

The numbers are declining though, which is why university places are VERY available this year.

In Britain, we are now seeing the results of he Blair policy of 50% to university. This has changed the perceived "value" of a degree to employers, and therefore to those who purchase tertiary education.

These changes are now beginning to work through (and there is a new emphasis on apprenticeships) but right now I think there's a bit of a bind as the old A level entry jobs often require degrees, and old O level jobs require A levels.

It doesn't help that the divergence between perceptions of value of a 'good' degree and the rest have widened. This began with the rebranding of polys, and has continued as a proxy for academic rigour. The '50% to university' may have increased the number of graduates in that cohort of the population, but did not make all degrees 'equal'

I agree with Daisychain, then again isn't university also a 'rite of passage' part of the process of becoming independent, flying the nest, making new connections.

Except it's increasingly common for fledglings to return to the nest and fail to actually fully fledge :(

Very interesting thread Toad. I was talking to my children (13 and nearly 11) about the possibility of them not going to University last night, which would have been unthinkable a few years ago, as both dh and I have decent degrees as do most people we know.

However, paying back a student loan is NOT affordable when housing costs are also so very high. They two things put together would mean, I'm sure, that my dc will have debt blighted 20s and 30s, which I would hate for them to experience.

My younger sister is 36 and has been working more or less full time in her chosen profession since she finished her degree and she has only just finished paying off her student loan - which was not as high as the loans the average student is taking on these days!

I am encouraging my dc to think independently and try and be enterprising!

splendide

I think most people go to university to improve their job prospects regardless of the discipline they study, and enjoy the learning experience as a nice extra benefit. However, I also think that if taking a degree clearly didn't result in improved prospects, most people would regard it as a luxury and wouldn't do it. In making this point I do not want to suggest that learning for its own sake is pointless. Far from it. If people want to take a degree, great. They should not have to, ie, to avoid spending the rest of one's life in NMW jobs.

The tradition of tertiary study as a Platonic means to improve one's mind (ie, by reading the classics and humanities) has a very long history. However, it was traditionally bound up with membership of an academic elite or, more recently, a relatively small number of high-ranking civil service or blue-chip jobs, or a career in politics. What has happened in more recent years is that the numbers who study such subjects has increased far in excess of the jobs those disciplines led to. I think this explains why so many people have drifted into tertiary study without really thinking about they might do afterwards - the assumption is that if one gets into an decent university and gets a second, the future will look after itself. Big mistake.

I'm also sceptical of "transferrable skills". I fear this has become a sales pitch without basis. I wonder if a lot of people would have had those skills without attending university.

It's not a debt, it's a tax.

But I agree that apprenticeships and routes into industry should be more accessible and attractive. We need more incentives to get young people into STEM jobs, and I'm disappointed that this isn't more visible.

For me the Opening Post is full of statements & prejudices I don't share. The whole thesis of the doom-n-gloom prognosis I don't share (and neither do most of today's 18-20yr olds).

It was the norm when I was applying for University in my Western country 30 yrs ago for about 50% to start Uni education. Had been the norm in our culture for 10-20 yrs by then. Completion rate about 33% (this is about same for today's Freshmen, too).

& yet I know 22-23 yr old people (from my culture and UK) without Uni degrees who are buying cars and houses in expensive places without parental funding. They don't have amazing skills, but are finding ways forward (since OP is asking for alternatives, both are working for small businesses and have moved up to be managers, as 18yos they just applied for entry level jobs, got them and worked their way up proving their merits). They were very clever at school but not genius level. There are so many successful ways to get thru life.

Most of today's UK young people won't end up with university degrees and most of them will still have work-related outcomes that they find satisfactory.

The English student debt burden is not bad at all (not compared to what I was offered in my country 25-30 yrs ago).

Some people have always made poor choices in their university course (nothing has changed that much).

Most young people do not share the doom-n-gloom perspective so often quoted on MN about the value of university degrees (the common prejudice on MN is that at least 70% of Uni degrees are worthless). Young people are optimists (actually most of us are, really). Maybe that's what surprises OP.

Which country is that?