Almost half of Britons think too many young people go to university
https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/53165-almost-half-of-britons-think-too-many-young-people-go-to-university
Posted by insomnimax_99
Almost half of Britons think too many young people go to university
https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/53165-almost-half-of-britons-think-too-many-young-people-go-to-university
Posted by insomnimax_99
38 Comments
How many of those same people think 24k for a office junior role that requires a degree is alright though? Or all jobs beyond a certain point requiring degrees that their predecessors in the same exact job did not need
I bet the two numbers put together would be a good case study for cognitive dissonance
I graduated in 2009 and could only find a job in a call centre for just above minimum wage. They only recruited people with degrees. Cannot imagine what it is like for graduates these days.
Worth pointing out the demographic of the “half of Britons” consists of both graduates and non graduates (at 45% each) and that not enough go (to uni) sits at 10% each.
Turning polytechnics into unis was always going to have that as an end result
I think it would be beneficial to the country if most people went to university.
You don’t hear people say that too many young people go to school. If we think about university as a place of education for the sake of intelligence over education for the sake of getting a job, I think it’s obvious why our country would benefit if most people went to university.
Many of the UK’s issues are caused by our populace being thick as shit and voting for dumb shit.
I remember doing my gcses being told by the headteacher in assembly that university was the route to success. They championed it at every turn and made no time for other paths. I really struggled through a levels and university. Eventually found my feet at 30 but I do wonder what might have been if I’d gone down a more practical path.
The school just hammered university as the be all and end all.
So more than half don’t. Funny how these articles choose the stat they want to push. Almost like they already made their mind up what opinion to push.
And how many people think years of experience for entry roles with a degree is appropriate?
I work in HR and it always blows my mind to think just how many people with degrees including STEM degrees have been on the phones and in data input jobs for 10+ years. I know people who have degrees who have been in retail all through their 20s and 30s.
Saying too many people go to University does sounds like a boomer take, but there’s definitely a discussion to be had as to what jobs people’s degrees actually set them up for, in my experience.
Having middle class parents who drum the need for a degree into you and then ending up in an entry level job after you graduate and never really leaving it is totally a thing.
Less than half of the people i went to uni with got a job in their field of study. Most of them studied a valuable field (IT). I cant imagine what its like for things like media studies or art.
I think most people go to uni as its the path of least resistance to move out and start life with lots of partying.
Most people would be far better financially in life if they did an apprenticeship and picked up a trade.
What do people think you’re supposed to do if you don’t get a degree? Go and work down a mine? Those jobs disappeared decades ago and everything else requires some kind of qualification.
Almost half of Britons think too many of **other people’s children* go to university.
Almost half of Britons also thought the fishing industry was more important to prioritise than the banking industry in the Brexit deal.
Not nice to say but half the country is fucking stupid
This is posted as rage bait of boomers complaining about young people having silly degrees.
But there’s a perfectly valid argument that the importance of university is over exaggerated, and more focus and funding needs to be put into apprenticeships, and skills based training post 18. There’s a big gap in the jobs market that needs to be filled from people coming from overseas, likewise you end up with entry level office jobs requiring degrees with no relevance, as just a way of cutting down applicants.
Probably because degree requirements are now just a tick box exercise for employers and are no longer a differentiator unless you are going for highly specific roles.
The problem with the degree conversations is that half the people are idyllic and the other half are being practical.
The practical reality is that we’ve produced so many graduates that it’s had a material impact on hiring patterns.
We’ve also an ingrained snobby attitude which means that we are not actually spending time putting resources into actually training and educating in the skills we as a country need.
Just sending a large cohort to university makes it seem like the country is doing something but we may be misallocating talents
Everyone should go to university if they want/ can. The exposure to different people is very important and fundamental to you navigating the working world. If more people left their home towns then maybe we’d have less hate and ignorance in this country.
The problem is ending not getting a high paid job associated with your degree and having a lifetime of crippling graduate tax you could have avoided.
Teenager: Only just turns 18 and becomes a legal adult with barely any life experience or ability to navigate the world. Having little to no practice in making serious life decisions and a brain that is yet to be fully developed
Government: “Here, lets slap you a life time worth of debt”
Talk about being taken advantage of.
I went to school in the 90’s. We were all pushed to go to Uni. Regardless of how academic you were, going to Uni was very much the end goal.
I’ve known so many people study bullshit ‘made up’ degrees, or study subjects they had no or only a passing interest in, only to drop out or get a qualification in a field that they didn’t pursue a career in or had zero employment prospects. I’ve known people with degrees in English AND Politics, who ended up a barman. Genetic engineering who became a line cook and another who did music technology who now fits burglar alarms.
I remember the ‘CSI effect’, where the popularity of TV shows sent thousands of kids every year to study Forensic science. A field which might have had a few hundred positions in the whole UK.
We seem to have a situation where everyone is so over qualified, but not for anything remotely useful. And now even entry level office admin jobs are expecting you to have been to Uni. Meanwhile, there’s a chronic shortage of Builders, plumbers, electricians and other trades. I don’t know if its because parents or kids see manual jobs as being beneath them, but I guaranteed a Plumber will earn 3-4 times as much as half the kids who ever go to Uni.
Im a Millennial and this is properly my most opinion. There are too my universities. There’s not enough students to support them anymore anyway. We should be bringing back the polytechnic trade schools. Real trade Apprenticeships, not the bullshit ones office jobs use to get out of paying minimum wage.
University is just a label, people who previously went to polytechnics now go to universities, but that is partly just a rebranding.
I think what matters is whether or not university provides skills which are directly relevant afterwards. So for example doing engineering at the University of Derby and then working for Rolls Royce compared to doing English Literature at a former polytechnic and then working out what you’re going to do five years later, it doesn’t matter whether you brand that university or not. What matters is whether university is basically a model of middle or upper class finishing school which give you contacts, or whether it is directly giving you skills, expertise and knowledge which you can then use for your benefit and the benefit of the country.
I’m sure it is a huge benefit to go to Oxford, do PPE, learn fashionable ideas and meet people who will run the country, but ‘giving everyone the same opportunity’ doesn’t scale because a large part of the advantage is exclusivity.
What is particularly rough in Britain for social mobility is the disconnect from work, the extreme specialisation, and the need to make decisions in that specialisation extremely early. This rewards people who have inside knowledge of what subject to study, where has cachet, what internships you need to do and when. And makes it much more difficult for people on the outside whose parents can’t guide them at 15 or 16 what decisions they need to make for the rest of their life.
The more you obfuscate the connection between education and work the more that damages social mobility.
I really don’t see the point of unis where you need C’s and D’s to get in. Uni should be for strong academic students who are pursuing high skilled careers.
Even then, I went to a well regarded uni and did economics but didn’t particularly learn much. First couple of years were a piss up then you got your head down to do enough for a 2.1 in the final year.
Only really began learning useful skills once I started my first job. I reckon most people would be best off joining the workforce at 18, and the govt should be focusing on helping create these opportunities for young people.
Too many people are definitely going to University studying subjects for which there are no obvious career routes at the other end and they end up stacking shelves. We need less people studying Media, Creative Writing and Tourism and more people studying Nursing, Accounting and Mechanical Engineering.
Too many people go to university, but my kids should definitely go. It’s other people’s kids who shouldn’t go.
45% of graduates believe too many people go to university. That’s pretty telling.
It’s so bad
A degree is so worthless for so many people, but also required for everything. The real crime is the lack of good work options and apprenticeships offering pathways to higher earning outside of universities.
Even quite practical job-based degrees like nursing and engineering are far too heavy on turning the students into academics where we need workers.
I think in principle, adults choosing to educate themselves in something they enjoy is a great thing. For all its flaws the vast majority of students come out of a degree far more knowledgeable than before it. Self learning is great but exams and coursework provide feedback on interpretations and ideas that you don’t get with self study. That being said, so many entry level jobs “require” a degree even though it is unnecessary. While on the other hand most undergraduate degrees don’t give students real world work experience that will make them good in the workplace after graduation. For example most of the science graduates that come to do their mRes or PhD can’t do anything in the lab, so not only do they require a lot of training time they don’t even really know if they will enjoy lab work having largely done theoretical work. This makes them a tough sell to private companies. I have heard similar things in other fields, when you combine that with the ridiculous debt they get, I think the system needs a total revamp. I personally would like it to work a bit more like an apprenticeship (with more study). I would have the first year of study to get them up to speed then year two 40-50% of their time in a work placement. I don’t know how practical that would be for other fields though.
The question *”do you think too many people go to university?”* should be asked alongside *”how many people do you think go to university?”*
IIRC, it’s about a third of school-leavers which feels about the low-end of right to me.
If you Asked half of Briton if too many people are driving cars they’d say yes. This doesn’t mean anything unless you are prepared to have a nuanced and indepth conversation.
This is stupid nonsense.
Never trust people who want you to be less than what you are or who want you to be less educated.
It is the individual’s right to decide whether or not they go to university. It’s not meant to be vocational training either in all cases, there is a difference between studying something and training for a job.
Too many people do go to university.
Tony Blair was wrong to push so many people in to university when it’s simply not needed for most jobs. It’s created an artificially high entry level for jobs and It’s also moved people away from technical colleges and trades which the country is desperately lacking.
Employers will set education requirements for a job role based on _what they can get away with_ . If they can say a call centre job is graduates only and people show up for the interview, then they will keep doing it.
Really, with a lot of office jobs, your education has no bearing on whether you can do the job or not. Your education level is just used by HR as differentiation, a way of whittling down the applicants to a manageable amount.
This was the silliness of encouraging more and more people to go to University. While business was complaining there were not enough graduates for roles that needed Degree level expertise when this policy was introduced, they were talking about Vocational degrees. I bet that even with the increase in graduates there’s still a shortfall in these Vocational roles that is being filled by _legal_ immigrants. Nursing, for example. Every nurse you’ve met in a hospital has a degree. Two of my aunts were nurses that made it to ward sister level. They both told me their Nursing Degrees were tough.
Having more people with a degree also doesn’t suddenly mean more jobs that _need_ degrees are going to be magically created.
But we’ve now got 50% of 25-35 yo with a degree, most of which are not vocational. And so we have “graduate” roles paying barely above minimum wage, that don’t really need a degree to do, that the 50% of people that age that don’t have a degree, and are just as capable of doing, are **completely shut out from**.
All it has done is create yet another “them and us” inequality.
The minimum wage being this high is like a massive participation trophy en mass. It is like them saying dont worry about needing to work more hours to earn good money because you couldn’t/wouldn’t get qualified to degree level.
My friend in early years is a Deputy DSL and one of 3 who could go to prison if there was a breach in safeguarding protocols. They did 3 years of college, 12 years experience, and are a senior member of staff earning less than 50p more an hour than someone over 21 fresh from college.
I agree with them.
In my opinion, university is a waste of money for a lot of people. If you want to be a doctor, lawyer, vet or anything that you really need a degree for? Then it’s not a waste. But for people who could go into the workplace straight away and learn on the job? They’re wasting time and going into debt for no reason.
It doesn’t help that sixth forms absolutely push you into going into university too. It’s easier to get a student on UCAS than it is to help them find apprenticeships/jobs. It also looks good on them when they say ‘90% of our students went onto university.’ When I was doing my A-Levels, it felt as if there was no other option and there was a lack of support for me when I decided I didn’t want to go to university.
But it’d be unfair to ignore the biggest elephant in the room and that’s simply the general workplace. Our economy is absolutely fried, and a lot of businesses/companies cannot afford to facilitate apprenticeships. If there is one going, it’s insanely competitive. And if companies are looking at hiring? They want people with degrees and experience. They too also make it feel as if university is the only option.
It’s a lose lose situation.
Just because no one’s mentioned it yet, I don’t think people appreciate the impact on local economies if we were to have any significant rollback in the University sector. A huge number of towns and cities are now largely reliant on the employment the university provides and the money the students spend.
Going to university is the only reason I was able to move to Europe. Most of those who think too many go to university likely voted to take our European citizenship away, and rather give young people alternatives to move and travel would instead want us poor, stupid and miserable as we look at our peers in other countries have experiences we should have had. I have absolutely no time for these people.
A handful of O Levels (GCSE’s) used to be enough to get an entry level job. Now it’s a degree for the same job.
It’s worth putting this into perspective.
36.4% of 18 year olds go to university in the first place, and half of our population thinks that’s too much?
> The higher education entry rate among UK 18-year-olds increased from 24.7% in 2006 to 30.7% in 2015 and peaked at 38.2% in 2021. It fell back to 36.4% in 2024.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7857/
I feel it needs to be normalised that it’s ok not to go to college or uni; but at the same time we need more training schemes and apprenticeships for school leavers. I know a few parents from work and my social group practically forced their kids into uni, despite the costs, just to do a degree they have no interest in. So far, most of them have dropped out and the parents are several grand down.