Last term, our engineering department was offered three apprenticeships at a prestigious company. We gathered all the level 2 students to tell them about this great opportunity. They would be earning more than £9,000 a year, with prospects of up to £60,000 when fully trained.
“No,” they said - all of them. “We want to go to university.”
These 31 budding engineers are all perfectly good students. But many have limited maths and English, and will have to work very hard to get into university in a year or two. They will then have to complete a three-year degree programme, running up an average debt of £44,000 in the process.
Going to the wrong university to do the wrong subject can lead straight into a dead end
The apprenticeship route offers far better prospects of good earnings without any debt and a faster, surer route into secure, high-quality employment. They could even do a part-time degree later on, or a degree apprenticeship. But no. They, their teachers and their parents are totally convinced that a university degree is the only route to success. Welcome to the world of the “loonyversity”.
It’s a world created by successive governments that have trumpeted the value of a university education even as student fees have risen steeply. It’s a world created by universities, naturally keen to see their student numbers and incomes swell. And it’s a world created by a system in which secondaries’ reputation is increasingly linked to the numbers they get into university.
A Wolf at the door
There’s no doubt that getting a good degree at a top university in the right subject is an enormous boost to anyone’s career. But it’s also clear that going to the wrong university to do the wrong subject can lead straight into a dead end. A significant minority of graduates (around one in four, according to research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies) actually earn less than those who don’t go to university, at only about £20,000 per year.
Thankfully, those of us who are distressed by this madness have a powerful champion. Riding into battle is Baroness Wolf, who has already recommended new programmes of study for 16-18s. If you haven’t read her recent report, do so immediately.
Armed with the old-fashioned weapons of evidence, reason, intellectual rigour and moral clarity, Baroness Wolf has tackled the loonyversity phenomenon head on.
To quote her conclusion, policies designed to expand the numbers doing university degrees are “totally unnecessary, highly expensive, involve major misallocation of resources and are ruinous to equal opportunity”.
We need to rally behind this message. Encouraging school-leavers to go to loonyversity not only discredits the value of university but funnels people from predominantly disadvantaged backgrounds into a costly career quagmire. It’s the duty of all of us in education to stop this happening.
Andy Forbes is principal of the College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London
