Nigel Hastilow: Why university might not be worth the money for you

Back in the day, going to university was for a lucky few and the State paid most of the cost.

These days, it’s a right for anyone who can scrape together a couple of A-levels and universities are desperate for their custom.

But the students have to pay for it. And in many – probably most – cases, it’s really not worth the expense.

You will emerge in three years’ time with a huge debt which will burden you for the rest of your working life.

In exchange, your university will spend a few desultory hours ‘educating’ you in subjects of almost no relevance to your future career.

Because you now have a degree, you will make the perfectly reasonable assumption that you are employable and worth a decent salary.

But unless you are a genuine academic high-flier, you will quickly discover that your degree does not qualify you for anything very much.

You will have to start on the bottom rung in any decent job or, even more frustratingly, you will discover there are no decent jobs to be had for someone with a degree like yours.

Of course you will have three years of fun. Universities often have great facilities. You can spend time developing your social life. But the price you pay isn’t just in cheap vodka shots, it’s in the debts you run up which could well be as high as £50,000.

For thousands of school-leavers, going to university is just not worth it. You are wasting time and money when you could be starting out on a proper career in anything from engineering to accountancy.

You would actually get paid as an apprentice, qualify much more quickly than your undergraduate contemporaries and be well down the road to success before they have even got back from a final fling in Ibiza to celebrate their dubious degrees.

As a would-be journalist, I quickly discovered my degree in English didn’t count for much when it came to learning my chosen trade.

Luckily, I wasn’t lumbered with a huge debt so my three years playing sport, discussing Wordsworth and Samuel Beckett and going to gigs didn’t do me any serious financial harm.

There wasn’t much to be said for a degree even in those days, when universities churned out about 50,000 graduates a year; today it’s almost ten times as many.

The world has changed and the expansion of university places, with the aim of recruiting half of all 18-year-olds, is one of the great scandals of our time.

Universities are desperate for their business, to the extent that some of them have this year been offering cash bonuses, free laptops, gym membership and even free flights to entice young people into their arms.

They offer all sort of blandishments to snare the unwary, from ‘unparalleled pastoral care’ to ‘safe spaces’ where nobody is allowed to say anything that someone else might consider offensive.

Even the poshest universities have lowered their standards to make sure all their places get filled.

At least this suggests some 18-year-olds have come to realise the whole thing is a massive con perpetrated on young people by a self-interested educational establishment.

One they’ve got your money, though, they won’t be particularly interested in what happens to you for the next three years.

And according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, only two-thirds of students who graduated between 2012 and 2016 went on to any sort of a job at all.

Incidentally, this means much of the total student debt in this country, which is already running at £100 billion, will never be repaid. Successive Governments have allowed this sum to accumulate so fast that one day soon the bubble will burst and every taxpayer will be forced to come to the rescue.

Yet, scandalously, university vice chancellors enjoyed a 2.5 per cent pay rise this year giving them an average salary of £280,000.

It’s got so bad that no fewer than three MPs have resigned from their roles at Bath University in protest at vice-chancellor Prof Dame Glynis Breakwell’s £451,000 a year salary.

Despite the downsides, about 450,000 young people will be going to university for the first time this autumn.

Yet the country suffers from acute skills shortages, in areas as diverse as engineering and nursing.

A degree in law, languages or history – three of the areas with the highest graduate unemployment – won’t solve that crisis. Yet apprenticeships in nursing and engineering are readily available.

It is true a university education is not all about the money. It can enrich people’s lives and provide opportunities they might otherwise be denied. And in many cases it does deliver a worthwhile and valuable career.

Yet the university and loans system we have today is nothing but a shameless gravy-train for cosseted academics fuelled by the naïve hopes and dreams of a generation of young people.