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Telegraph

It's time to think again about the purpose of a university education

SIR – Successive governments have increased targets for the number of school pupils going on to university. Less attention appears to have been devoted, however, to determining how many graduates we actually need in order to maintain this nation's intellectual horsepower. Currently, many students go on to gain – at great cost – obscure degrees that do little to prepare them for the job market. A lot of them would be better off gaining more practical skills from vocational training; the country would also benefit from this. It is true, as Jemima Lewis argues (Comment, May 15), that university provides an ideal environment in which to make the transition from childhood to adulthood, but there must be better ways. We need a review of universities and the university system, and some radical changes. If this results in a number of institutions going to the wall, so be it. Mark Rayner Eastbourne, East Sussex SIR – Jemima Lewis is right that there is more to a degree than the promise of a well-paid job, but there are other benefits worth adding to the ones she puts forward. University should be for training minds in rational thought and objective judgment, rather than memorising and repeating received wisdom. It is only after this rigorous training that the vocational element should be addressed. I can only speak from personal experience, having taken a degree in modern languages that did not require fluency in those languages but demanded strong skills in research and argument. I then qualified as a chartered accountant. In my career I found that the ability to make decisions under time pressure was the main requirement of the job – for which the rigour of my degree was much more useful than accountancy training. The reversal of the so-called graduate premium is down to the proliferation of inappropriate degree subjects, which make few intellectual demands of students. There is a strong case for scrapping these. Donald Clarke Tunbridge Wells, Kent