Here’s a thought: you don’t have to be that bright to go to university. True, if your aim, as an 18-year-old, is to make it into one of the top institutions, where three A’s are two-a-penny, you’d better get your finger out. But if all you want is three easy years away from your parents and a degree handed to you by someone dressed up like an old-time Lord Chancellor, the chances are that UCAS – the universities and colleges admissions service – has a dorm room, somewhere, with your name on it.
Pictures of school-leavers jumping for joy as they learn that they have been accepted in record numbers to read psychology at their second-choice uni, or chemistry somewhere in the Midlands , or, more likely, English at one of the new “metropolitan” universities, have featured yet again in the national press. We are all supposed to be delighted for them, even though we know that their degrees, when they get them, will have cost them far more than they can afford and are unlikely to secure them “proper” jobs.
As the old adage has it, when everybody is somebody, then no one is anybody. When I began my inglorious career at university (don’t ask), only about seven per cent of my fellow schoolies became stoodies. Queen’s University, Belfast, where I screwed up, had about 7,000 undergraduates. Today it has 25,000, and the neighbouring University of Ulster, which didn’t exist in my day, has almost as many, with twice that number, at least, attending other UK and Irish colleges.
So is my beloved province – whose GCSE and A-level results are regularly among the best in the UK – now a fine and dandy place, in which learning is everywhere apparent and the expectations of the populace are met with a smile and a nod of satisfaction at a job well done? No. As my brother-in-law Bryan Somers – who built several successful businesses in the greater Belfast area without the handicap of a degree – put it on Facebook: “We used to have universities, polytechnics, grammar schools and technical colleges … Now we have thousands of graduates from the likes of the University of Midsomer who will never achieve the earning potential to pay off their student loans – and it is impossible to get a plumber or a tiler.”
Graduates in the private sector can expect to start work earning as little as ÂŁ15,000 a year – considerably less than planemaker and trainmaker Bombardier pays its (mostly non-graduate) assembly workers. Two of the most sought-after graduate trainee schemes in Northern Ireland are run by Sainsbury’s and Tesco. There’s nothing wrong with that, by the way.
But we have more graduates than you could shake a stick it. The majority work in offices, where they confer little added value to anything, themselves included. By the time they’ve repaid their student debt, it’s time to load up the mortgage and think about retirement.
Graduates everywhere are being short-changed. Don’t listen to the stats about degrees and earning power. They just make them up, and even if they were accurate, the policy of getting everybody to go to university – which seems to be the general idea – must ultimately be self-defeating. Second and third-tier graduates are the new grunts, who toil and sweat for very little reward. Most would have done better to leave school at 18, so that by the time their uni-bound mates enter the workforce, they can show them the ropes and tell them what to do.
Before I go on, I should pause to admit the bleeding obvious: universities are important. Any country that wishes to call itself civilised or sensible must have a network of well-run, well-funded institutions where science is learned, research is conducted and those of genuine academic bent have somewhere in which to refine and grow their intellectual abilities.
Medicine, science, technology, law and the humanities all owe their development first and foremost to the existence of universities. Top exemplars – not just Oxford and Cambridge, but the rest of the Russell Group, and others besides – are vital to sustaining the nation’s IQ and its chances of competing in a ruthless world. To pretend otherwise would be to justify historian Andrew Robert’s one-time estimation of me as someone with a third-class degree from the University of Life, where I shared a staircase with John Major.
But sending more and more people who do NOT have an academic bent to waste three years of their lives learning stuff that they mostly forget and hardly ever make use of is not only colossally stupid, but ruinously expensive.
Okay, the seven per cent I spoke of earlier was too little. Maybe 15-20 per cent would be about right. But 50 per cent, and rising? Don’t make make laugh. Are we all to be officers now?
Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that most present-day students are stupid. On the contrary, they are, on average, averagely intelligent, which is why so many of them end up with the same grades. But what is the point of obliging increasing numbers of them, with a whole range of untapped skills, to spend three years studying English, or psychology, or sociology, or management studies, or “gaming” when they could have been learning a profession or a trade, and earning good money, free of debt, in the process. Who needs estate agents or insurance advisers with degrees in media studies? I mean, seriously.
What Britain actually needs, for beyond mere rhetoric, is more vocational training and more apprenticeships. We need young people who know how to do things and make things. Such people should be valued, and rewarded. The economy is crying out for them. Germany understands this, which is why they are streets ahead of us in the skills department, if not in their ability to reproduce the species.
By all means, congratulate those optimistic A-levellers who are about to move into their first student digs. Just be aware that when they come out the other side, only a fraction of them will rise higher than levels C or B in their chosen field, should they manage to get into it in the first place. They have been sold a pup. We have lied to them. Time to tell the truth and put things right.
Needless to say, like my brother-in-law – and John Major – I have first-class honours in wasting my breath.
