There's more to university than the promise of a well-paid job

Telegraph

15-05-2025

When I was 18, doggedly indolent and on course to fail all my A-levels, my father staged an intervention. Lowering himself onto his knees before me like a supplicant monk, he knitted his hands together in prayer. 'All you have to do,' he begged, 'is enough revision to scrape through these exams. And then you can spend three years at university doing absolutely nothing.'
It was a brilliantly effective pep talk at the time. But no part of it rings true today. My eldest child is 17, and weighing up possible degree courses. To get into a Russell Group university, he will need a fat bouquet of A-grades: there can be no question of cramming, bluffing or scraping through. Once in, he will have to pay £9,535 a year in tuition fees, which is hardly conducive to relaxation. Undergraduates have become much more serious-minded and diligent since the introduction of student loans in 1998. A good thing, no doubt, except that their virtue is not being rewarded.
The so-called 'graduate premium' – the difference in average salaries between people who attended university and those who didn't – has been shrinking for decades, and now seems to have gone into reverse. Nearly three-quarters of new graduates earn less than £29,120: the median salary for people aged 22 to 29. Even three years later, they lag behind their peers who went straight from school to work.
Some degrees are more valuable than others: the boring ones. Computer science, business, maths and economics are the top salary-boosters. Whereas a degree in philosophy – my son's chosen subject – is likely to shave a couple of thousand a year off his starting salary. A responsible mother, in fact, would be on her knees begging him not to get into university. And yet, for reasons of nostalgia more than common sense, I can't help wanting him to have those three years between school and work. Not just the extra education, but the extra time.
I want him to experience the luxury (which it really is now, almost to the point of decadence) of playing at being a grown up, among your peers, far away from home. Even though my years at Newcastle University were just as academically idle as predicted, I acquired skills and memories that set me up for life. How to pay a bill, how to live with other people, how to make friends with boys. Time was so abundant that it ceased to feel progressive and became more like a soft, settled atmosphere: one composed of my flat mates' voices, the smell of old cigarettes, a strip of sunlight moving across the bedroom ceiling.
And parties and drugs and snogging too – all of which was instantly anecdotalised, so that we often seemed to be laughing at our misspent youth even as we were living it. University is such a generous interregnum. It comes just at the right moment, when you are composing the internal mythology that will sustain your self-image. It gives you a last shot at making a gang of friends, before you move into the more fragmented social milieu of work. None of this shows up on the fiscal balance sheet, of course. In terms of earning power, it is nothing but a waste of billable time. Worthless, and yet – I still believe – infinitely precious.