Last week, GCSE results were delivered to schoolchildren all over the country. The great middle-class sausage machine opens its maw – next A-levels, then university and onwards until the Elysian Fields of a profession or a desk job. Two of my four children have been through higher education and I expect the other two will do the same. However, the magical power of academic qualifications may be overstated. A recent Aviva survey showed that more than a third of graduates regret going to university.
My own experience of university, as a mature student in the 1980s, led me to discover something very important about myself – namely, that I was not nearly as clever as I thought I was. I found my three years at the London School of Economics a mortal struggle against the limitations of my own intellect and my rather inadequate state education (I had two poor A-levels).
Perhaps this is what a lot of those regretful students feel – that they were led into doing something they were fundamentally unsuited for, just to fit in with society’s norms and expectations. I went to university not to get a job or because I was expected to, but because I had a curiosity that sometimes outran my intellect.
So, given my own struggles, should I be so keen to put my own children through the same experience? It’s a difficult question. I had a breakdown after university and was depressed much of the time I was there, partly (but not solely) because of the rigors required of me. I wasn’t unusual – in 2014-15, more than 43,000 students received counselling at Russell Group universities.
What I wanted was not to “get” anything, but to train my mind to think more clearly – to give me the tools to analyse information. To this day, I do not know if the process was a success. It did teach me, however, a very useful truth, one that university was once meant to inculcate – how little I knew, indeed, how little could be known. In short, I spent the three years exploring the vast chasm between belief and knowledge. And that was truly valuable – certainly if you wanted to be a novelist.
This profound negative no longer appears to be a stated function of higher education – understandably, as it would be quite hard to sell. The idea now is that as a consumer, you “get” something out of it – a cartload of facts, an increase in your pay packet, a sense of confidence, and expansion of contacts and experiences.
Perhaps you do get those things, but the humility that I always feel should be the result of higher education seems lacking. Maybe this is why so many children who go to university are disappointed and regretful – not because they had a bad experience, but because they were misled as to what they should have expected in the first place.
What some universities seem to offer, certainly in the humanities, is the illusion of knowledge, the vocabulary of intellect – and in the worse case, an inculcated view of the world rather than the ability to think for yourself. But maybe that’s because I know too much about French literary theory.
Having expressed these reservations, I cannot deny that my eldest children loved university and my youngest will undoubtedly follow in their path. I wish them well. But students should be in no doubt – university, as well as being expensive, can be painful and although you may get something valuable out of it, it might not be what you expect. University, particularly in the humanities, is, or should be, a door into doubt, not a leap into “knowledge”. And unless you understand that it is there to help you to frame questions, rather than to give you answers, the numbers of those disappointed with higher education is unlikely to fall in the near future.
