Congratulations to your daughter for having a mind of her own and not following the rest of the sheep into debt. After all she will only get a piece of paper telling her how clever she is.

Unfortunately, this generation have all been brainwashed or emotionally forced into higher education. Just a way of keeping unemployment figures down. There is no guarantee of work at the end of the course. It's not what you know, but who you know.

I have a daughter in her final year. Her debt is relatively small compared to her friends who live in university grounds, approx £15k each. They have pretty much been told that there are not enough jobs for them all ( teachers) when they finish their course, of which, it works out at roughly 15 hours per week of lectures, that's if some don't get cancelled, which is quite often.

Once your daughter sees that 1st pay packet, she'll forget about university. There is no greater incentive than money.

To be fair, two Es would have got you into a Higher Education college even 25 years ago or possibly a Polytechnic. Having worked with plenty people over the years with degrees from these places (mostly Engineers) the quality of their education isn't noticeably different from those who got Bs and As and went to University. The only difference seems to be the numbers taking part.

Mentioned before, but worth reiterating here. Huge increases in tertiary education are, for some reason, a plank of neo-liberalism, as explained by Ha-Joon Chang in [i23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism[/i.

In the last couple of decades or so, even Switzerland, which had a very small tertiary system but obviously was a successful, advanced economy, has started vastly increasing tertiary education. So it's certainly not unique to the UK.

Possibly it's partly because, once you remove grants etc, it increases education as a business, both in terms of domestic and foreign students?

But it's also linked to or been helped by moves over the last 20-25 years by many employers to demand a graduate, irrespective of the degree subject, for jobs that do not really require a degree.

It fits the ideology of unburden the state and open it up to the markets.



For that I blame the rise of the HR department. In the late eighties, the factory where I worked employed three thousand people and had a personnel department of about five. I work in a similar sized establishment now and they have a whole floor of people who spend their days dreaming up Apprentice style tasks for potential recruits.

I also share a desk with an extremely bright recent graduate who recalled going to a recruiting day for a large organisation. She was told that they were looking for two recruits out of a couple of hundred people. She waited till the first break and then headed for the car park never to return!

I was offered two E's to go Leeds Poly in 1977. Most Poly's did that sort of offer back then. In contrast when my son applied to study Physics one of the places he applied to is what was Hatfield Poly which is now the University of Hertfordshire and this was one of the highest offers of the lot! Nottingham Trent wasn't far behind either.

So do I.
In my own recent experience of our own HR department, I have given them the requirements and experience that I want applicants to be able to demonstrate, to which HR then add their own, including degrees (any subject) and then, after I've interviewed them, make the applicants spend a day jumping through various stupid hoops to see how they would shape-up in future roles they haven't frickin' applied for and don't see as their future.