Shock! Horror! A third of graduates claim they wouldn't have gone to university if they had faced fees of £3,000. Oh yeah, right.
There are a lot of daft surveys about but in a strong field this one is certainly in the running for Daft Survey of the Week and it's sad to see the respected UK Graduate Careers Survey indulging in hypothetical nonsense.
What students think they might have done three or four years ago has to rank as one of the irrelevant questions of all time and the idea that it ought to influence an important policy debate is laughable.
Would your time at university been different if you had/had not got together with that boy/girl in freshers week? That's for private daydreams, not elaborate interviews with 16,452 final-year students.
The question is what do young people actually do, not what they might or might not have done. And what we do know is that these graduates were among the first to pay fees - and pay them upfront - and they still went to university.
Now they are looking forward to better jobs as a result - some expect to be making £100,000 by the age of 30 apparently - and ask us to believe they would have thrown all that away because of fears of debt.
Far from shedding light on the question of fees, this sort of survey only adds to the hysteria surrounding the subject. (A press release is no doubt being prepared (slowly) by the National Union of Students as you read this to fight over the lost battle of fees again.)
There is a serious question about fees - are current and future students likely to be deterred?
Today there is confirmation from the admissions service Ucas that there has been a 3% drop in applicants. Though in part a reaction to last year's rush to beat fees, it looks as though their introduction is putting some people off - due partly of course to the stream of negative comment generated by this sort of survey.
Faced with this sort of misinformation, it will take a couple of years for the penny to drop and students to realise that they don't have to pay fees upfront and that all this scary debt is not like credit cards but will come off their pay packets in scarcely noticable amounts.
They will also be more clued up about grants and bursaries. While it was being hypothetical, why didn't the UK Graduate Careers Survey ask if they would have liked a grant or a really big bursary when they were studying?
