GOING out every night, meeting new people and making memories. The student life sounds great – so why are many people deciding not to follow this traditional route?
It can be a very hard decision for any teenager to make.
Scrolling through social media in the evening, there are posts about friends socialising at uni.
For an extrovert, there’s some jealousy – who wouldn’t want to be there?
Throughout my years at school, I enjoyed most subjects but average academically. There was never really a subject that I particularly shone in.
Not knowing what I wanted to do after school meant that when people asked which university I wanted to go to it left me feeling quite confused and overwhelmed.
You hear about people getting their degree of choice, then working for 50 years before retiring and living off the pension they’ve been building up their whole life.
As comfortable and structured as that sounds, that wasn’t for me – and it’s not for many others nowadays.
Putting the social life to one side, which covid has done, in many cases you study for three years, create a debt of around £40,000 and get yet another certificate, which says you have a degree.
This may seem fundamentally important in order to continue down your chosen career path, but realistically how important actually is it?
Statistically, in England the L-DLHE RQ4 survey says that only “36% of students actually go into their chosen field after finishing university,” although these numbers are higher in specific highly skilled professions, such as medicine and engineering.
Some skills that you gain from your degree are invaluable and will, of course, be helpful for other jobs, but many can’t see how you justify spending time and money to get a degree in a subject you may not pursue further.
Of course, some careers favour a university degree in order to succeed in them.
Under the current climate we can see how times are changing.
There are companies wanting to know about the individual rather than their education as alternatives such as apprenticeships and practical degrees become more readily available (even for the legal profession).
This means that now more than ever it may be worth spending some time thinking about other options.
Ed Nash
