Photograph: Corbis
According to two university heads, today's undergraduates no longer expect to love their subject the way they did a decade ago. All they care about now is job prospects. Is this true?
Stating this view in EducationGuardian earlier this month, the vice-chancellors admitted their evidence came from talking to students, not hard data.
So now for the - previously unpublished - hard data.
Pollsters asked 130,000 UK students, who had applied to university in the summer of 2006, but had not yet started their courses, why they wanted to go on to higher education and why they had chosen their particular course.
The main reason most of them (35.1%) gave for going on to university was that it was part of their long-term career plan.
Some 21.6% said their main reason for getting a degree was that it would enable them to get a "good job". A further 16.9% gave their main reason as wanting to study a particular subject.
So far, it seems, the vice-chancellors' suspicions stand up.
But when it came to what their main reason was for choosing their subject, the students had a far less instrumentalist approach. "For the love of it", replied almost 38%.
Some 19.6% gave their main reason as an interest in the content of the course. Exactly 20% said their main reason was to enter a particular profession.
The vice-chancellors claimed student attitudes have changed because: current government policies favour the knowledge economy over the "learning society"; a ceaseless concentration of exams and coursework in school stops pupils cultivating a love for a subject; and tuition fees have led some students to think exclusively about the financial return on the cost of their degree.
The research, led by the Warwick Institute for Employment Research and funded by the Higher Education Careers Services Unit, backs up the first of these claims, but not quite the rest.
In addition, the pollsters say they found that 55% of those quizzed had a clear or pretty clear idea of what job they wanted on graduation. Some 8% said they had no idea.
Older students, women and those on vocational subjects were more likely to have a clear idea. Black students knew which subject they wanted to study more than white students did. Students from professional backgrounds - black or white - were less clear which subject and job they wanted to pursue than those from non-professional backgrounds.
Prof Kate Purcell, who is leading the study, says students taking on board the government's message that a degree "is a passport to the world of work", but still choose the subjects they think they will enjoy.
The research - called Futuretrack 2006 - will analyse whether the students change their views a year into their studies, in their final year and two years after they graduate.
The outcomes should prove interesting.
.jpg?w=600)
