to feel like we were scammed into going to University?

[Schleep]

When I was at school (completed sixth form 2009), if you were academic it was assumed that you'd go to University. The whole thing was pushed incredibly hard on us and, in retrospect, was quite propaganda-like - we had external people come and do loads of assemblies on how amazing Uni Life was, lots and lots of talk about how University would guarantee us high paying jobs and we were repeatedly told to not worry about the debt, the interest rate is practically zero and we'd never even realise the money was coming out.
(Of course, when you're in your teens, debt looks like free money anyway)

Fast forward 10, 15 years later - and all my friends are saddled with huge debts that they'll likely be paying off for the rest of their lives.
A lot of them have had their repayment contracts changed so its no longer written off after a certain time, the payment terms are not as favourable and interest rates have gone up.

I dodged a bullet by being rebellious and dropping out after just 1 term, and that term was just before the fees tripled (at the time, you'd have thought I was ruining my life the way the University/everyone responded.) and I feel incredibly lucky. A degree would not have increased my employability and I have no student debt.
But I have friends and family genuinely upset at the hundreds they're forking out each month for something they didn't want and (at least in their cases) they simply do not use.

I find it baffling that the system was funnelling people out of the workforce, into unnecessary (in many cases) education and saddling people with huge amounts of debt.

Apprenticeships also ger you a degree whilst earning 25k some of them and no debt. So lots available

Based on some of my friends experiences - digital marketing, accounting, and project management, to name a few. None of them went to University.

My husband is an electronics engineer and left school at 16. He earns much more than I ever will.

@Hoppinggreen

This is why DH is very keen for DS to go to Uni.
He says you can get so far but them will come up against a ceiling of not having a degree and whatever career path you take you will always have your degree

I agree this is the case. I don't think however that it should be. I find it ludicrous that spending 3 years studying French literature and writing a thesis on comparitive linguistic models when you were 21 has any bearing on you as a person or your skills or abilities in finance or client servicing or law or town planning when you are 38. It's 3 years studying something often very random and very unrelated. I suggest everything you did between 21 and 38 is far more relevant.

YANBU. My teachers told me I would never get into my chosen profession without a degree. I didn't want to go to university because I hate learning in that way. I chose a vocational course and was employed in my chosen career 12 months later and did very well in it. I've never needed a degree to do any of my jobs.

I've told my children to study something they enjoy at the level they find enjoyable, and that working is just as good as going to university.

However for a while I worked in the NHS and they are obsessed with people having masters degrees even for office based work. (At the level I was working at, in regional and national teams) And many colleagues were studying PhDs for fun which is a completely alien concept to me! My fun is in doing, not studying.

I think the tide will turn though generally because people can't afford to go to university.

I mentioned above that it was the Labour Government who introduced the idea of HE for all. It was Tony Blair's vision
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201719/ldselect/ldeconaf/139/13907.htm

Apparently he still advocates for even more of an increase in HE

institute.global/insights/economic-prosperity/we-dont-need-no-education-case-expanding-higher-education

This thread has really made me think too. This is my experience:

I'm gen X, and left secondary school in 1991. For context, my school got computers one year before I left, and my year weren't allowed to use them as we were leaving soon. It was a girls school, and we had typing lessons and home economics classes. It was expected that we would be secretaries, until we had kids. Even though only 30ish years ago, it was a different world, with far less career opportunities for women.

Watch any 80s movie, and you will see the attitude of the day towards women. You would be hard pushed to find a strong female lead character in any film (apart from a Cynthia Rothrock movie). It was all action heroes and testosterone, with token female sidekicks. But I digress ...

My daughter was born in 1998. I encouraged her to go to uni, because I wanted her to have more opportunities, and a better life than me, and the chance to be able to do something she enjoyed, rather than taking on any crap job to pay the bills. She left uni with a masters, and began a career doing something she always dreamed of, earning more money than I am at 50 years old.

I'm sorry it hasn't worked out so well for you, and maybe she is one of the lucky ones, but perhaps your parents have a similar reason for encouraging you to go to uni.

ALL OF THIS!

Its shameful that the Labour government pushed university education to the extent it did,.

Its shameful that so many employers lazily adopted ' a degree' as entry to jobs that a degree has not given the applicant the skills to do.

No-one, not employers and not young people, benefit from this nonsensical obsession with degrees.

The most successful women who wouldn't have got where they are today without their university education of the 2000s are probably not on Mumsnet in the middle of a working day to present their case.

Horses for courses. I have had two professions, both of which required specific (different) degrees. First time round was essentially free, I grew up (a bit), met lots of interesting people, travelled and had opportunities I would never have had. Second time round I paid full fees but I love my new career and could afford it.

My DCs are both at uni but it was an active choice and we can afford to pay for them. Eldest DC came home from school with tales of the cheap loans available. Experience of my graduating peers with their massive, griwing and endless loans told otherwise. They are now in 3rd year and looking at an extremely lucrative (and desired) competitive career they wouldn't have had a chance in without uni. DC2 is doing something a lot less obviously useful, but at a hni with a 'name'. Who knows where it will lead but if they had had to get loans I would have advised them to do something else. As it is, we are paying for them to grow, learn and spread wings and be exposed to selective opportunities. An expensive luxury but one we have knowingly entered.

Schools are misselling unis and student debt as destination of students is a selling point. So yes, uni can be a scam unless your eyes are wide open and you understand the true costs (and likely benefits).

I work with young people who are told they need a degree to get the kind of job I could have walked into at 18, straight out of school.

Of my 6th form, grammar school educated, cohort of the mid 80s, 8% went to university. The rest went to teacher training college, nursing training, trade apprenticeships, did part time business and accounting courses or went straight into the work place in entry level jobs and worked their way up. Everyone I'm still in touch with has done well.

So many degrees are wasted, so many jobs don't need degree qualified entrants. As a country we need trades joiners, electricians, mechanics. I know welders who make £80k a year.

We were sold a pup with the idea that young people need a degree to do well. Degrees have been devalued, the higher ed sector is broken.

Me too ( not many of us left!)

My nephew has always wanted to be a chef. He got a pt job in a gastropub at 15, and the head chef took him under his wing and taught him so much. At 18 he got a place at uni to study Hospitality Management but changed his mind and decided he wanted to learn from grass roots upwards. My brother and his ex (my nephew's mum) were up in arms because they thought he wouldn't be able to tun his own restaurant without a degree. Yeah right! When I was his age, if you wanted to be a chef you went to the local tech at 16 and did your City and Guilds, then worked your way up. What next.....degrees to be a hairdresser or a motor mechanic or other trades? Anyway my nephew stuck to his guns and is doing very well for himself!

I’ve been to university twice. Second degree was vocational and required for my subsequent job ( although that was a relatively recent development) . Eldest child has a masters , both the others started a degree, although one dropped out. They are now earning as much as the one with the masters.
Uni is the biggest scam of all, especially now almost every child is encouraged to go there - totally devalued. And then a massive debt /10% extra tax burden for the “privilege “”

YANBU. My DS won't be going to university, because it won't get him where he wants to go. I went in 99, and found university boring and socially restrictive. I feel like it held me back from growing up. I got a job in the first year which I did all through and loved, and I met people there who hadn't done A levels or university which widened my world a huge amount. I'm grateful I left with a manageable debt but I still only cleared it by age 40 due to maternity leave and retraining. My career is a degree career but I got it later (mostly funded) and my original one has never benefited my career directly. Waste of money and time.

All of my friends, my partner, both my parents and the majority of my family (of my generation) went to University and all of them think its a scam.
I know a lot of graduates who feel this way.

You've overlooked a lot of posts in this very thread from graduates who say its a scam too.

They are early on in their careers, wait and see how they progress, As people have said, it’s much easier and quicker to rise up when you have qualifications, you even had to do it yourself to progress in your career otherwise you would have more than likely been at a stand still

Yes and no . I've noticed a lot of clerical jobs adverts expect candidates to be educated to A level standard and above . I think it's very important to get Maths and English GCSE at the higher end of the scale as you won't get any decent job without them . Aldo keep your computer skills up .

My son definitely wouldn’t have his job without a degree. But he was careful to choose a career that paid well from the outset and had a job already before he began his last year of uni. He has to pay hundreds back a month for his student loan and the loan keeps increasing, but without it he wouldn’t have such a well paid job.
I think degree apprenticeships are great but they are harder to get on because there aren’t that many places.

I’m not sure that was typical. I went to Uni in 1993 and as many girls as boys from my 6th form college went to Uni and more girls than boys from my school did A levels vs vocational courses.

It was Labour trying to upskill, but it was also a way of getting young people off the dole. I kid you not. Prior to this, we’d had decades of political upheaval since the 1970s, whole industries going under such as mining, steel, shipbuilding, car plants where young men in particular might have got apprenticeships, pathetic attempts by governments to get people off the dole including the YTS scheme.

When Blair’s Labour came along, they chucked money into education (it’s the only time in my 36 year teaching career that we ever seemed to have genuinely adequate funding), and decided that encouraging teens into uni would get them off the unemployment figures as well as upskill. Win win.

Old Polys and Colleges of HE became universities to cope with the influx, but the whole system got greedy. Fees, no grants, loans etc and here we are.
Lots of educated people and still a lack of skilled jobs.

It's not just university that is a scam, children are groomed to believe that hard work brings success. This may be true when they are taking exams, but in the real world it's a total lie. Success requires hard work most of the time, but working hard doesn't bring success by itself. You need the right connections, the right background or sheer luck in addition to the hard work.

It is a scam in 2025. To leave university with debt that you can't even service the interest for until you earn £55k let alone repay capital is a SCAM. Some people get degrees and go into very highly paid positions eventually but most people don't. If your salary ceiling is £60k for example and you're barely paying off the interest of your loan how is that value for money? Sincerely, a person with two degrees!

Let's not even broach the fact that AGI is making most careers obsolete within the next few years and our young people need to radically rethink their career options...

They’re not early on in their careers - and it’s the one who dropped out earning the most. The second degree I took used to be a college course , with learning interspersed with work placements. I subsequently worked with those who had trained that way, we all agreed it was much more suited to the actual job . But there is now so much pressure to make every job a “ graduate career “ that it was changed to a degree corse. Jobs like Acoountancy, nursing, physio, never used to need a degree. I can’t help wondering who’s making the money out of this, and what the actual incentive to make almost every child be pushed into university is .

Short sighted.
DD hasn’t got a degree, works in data after an early career in financial software and at 28 is earning more than I did as a full time teacher on the upper pay scale. Finding a gap and being intelligent has got her there.

Yeah, I didn't go. I bought a house instead. It does limit my access to grinding corporate gigs but maybe this is also a bonus?

If you are going to be a proper licensed professional, like a doctor or engineer, then you have to go as it's the rules. For the rest of us it's an amazing bauble really. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to take three years off work to read books and go to lectures about Kant. Or just do loads of weird niche maths! Sounds amazing! I'd pay to do it if I could afford to. But I can't afford to and probably most people can't, really. So I watch MIT lectures on Youtube and use the local library instead, because it's better to have shelter at the end of the day.