For a while now I’ve been having a conversation with friends that a few years ago would’ve been largely unthinkable. Partly, this is because of how sheltered we all tend to be when trying to imagine our kids’ lives running on different tracks to our own. But it’s also about the world changing. A brilliant young person I know left school, took up an internship, turned it into a job and now she’s in her early 20s with no debt and a great position at a big fashion house. “Maybe I won’t go to university, either,” said one of my kids, eyeing me for a reaction, while I nodded thoughtfully and tried to ride out the panic.
Andy Burnham’s announcement this week that university shouldn’t be the single, aspirational goal of all young people is perfectly timed and sensibly presented and shouldn’t sound as radical as it does. It is, of course, a correction to existing norms that university-for-all is a proper national goal and the only personal determinant of ambition and success. By contrast, Burnham said on Tuesday, this country should “value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap” as he spoke about tailoring technical and vocational training to meet local job needs and tackle youth unemployment.
The evidence on the ground suggests that a culture shift is already under way and that Burnham is simply validating an existing trend. I’m in the US at the moment, where the cost-reward ratio of going to college is so out of whack that student numbers have been dropping for years. Smart people on podcasts direct young people towards their in-state universities, which charge a fraction of the cost of the prestigious private ones (not the Ivy Leagues, so much, which can afford to subsidise any family making less than $400,000 a year, but the smaller, boutique liberal arts colleges that charge as much as $80,000 in annual tuition and have been closing due to dwindling student numbers).
In the UK, too, for the last two years, university numbers have dipped slightly. This is partly a result of changing demographics – smaller families mean a smaller supply of school-leaving 18-year-olds – and partly to do with the cost, as increasing numbers of universities charge the highest tariff rate, even those that, a few years ago, were middle to low fee-charging.
The question is what this is doing to perceptions about the usefulness or otherwise of going to college, which, as we know, isn’t just about earning potential. In both the US and the UK, being a graduate still delivers average median earnings that are higher than the earnings of non-graduates. But while middle-class people make jokes about how their plumbers probably earn more than they do, the fact remains that it is the other stuff – the cultural and social capital of going to college – that underscores this particular bias.
So it is that, while “low-value” degrees have been the target of derision for decades – ever since media studies became a thing in the 90s – when you dig down into why people want their kids to go to university, it has as much to do with social benefits as academic attainment. When will they meet the friends who will stay with them and godparent their children if not while sitting around watching mid-morning telly for three years as they slowly mature into adults? Are those friendships worth 10 grand a year? How, exactly, do you put a value on the non-academic stuff? I always think of a thing Don DeLillo said once about honouring a need to “drink coffee and look at the world” for a space of years, something that in the current economic climate sounds like a preposterous indulgence. And yet, for lots of 18-year-olds, it remains a valuable exercise.
But not all of them. The problem with current thinking about university is that it’s so uniform, and the main takeaway from Burnham’s speech is a reminder that there is more than one way of doing things. You can go to college, or not go to college, or go at 35 not 18, and all those things should be regarded as equal. Meanwhile the whole conversation around college is just part of a larger one about changing work patterns in which, on the evidence so far, gen Z are proving reluctant to repeat the experience of their parents’ generation by taking up office jobs – with additional pushback from gen X, who feel they came of age in office structures that taught them all sorts of useful things, such as how to work alongside people they found basically unbearable.
We all bring such biases to these questions of how to live life. I went to university and want my kids to do the same. My mum would’ve loved to have gone to university but had to leave school at 16 and I’m sure that’s in the mix, too. But when the question of college education came up in our house, I tried hard to take myself off generational autopilot, stop being so hidebound by precedent, and properly consider the alternative.
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Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist. She is the author of She Left Me The Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me
