Young people need skills not easy degrees

What’s the best route to success for a young person? New Labour’s answer was: go to university. Tony Blair set a ridiculous target of 50 per cent attendance, creating a business model for higher education based on tempting ever more people to study for degrees they don’t need and the market doesn’t want. Make no mistake: university can be an enlightening, empowering experience. But it’s not for everyone. And the bankruptcy of New Labour’s policy is proved by the revelation that nearly a quarter of all university offers are now unconditional. What reason could there be for this sudden, massive increase in such offers other than universities being desperate to fill places and cash-in?

One consequence, writes Dr Martin Stephen, former high master of St Paul’s Boy’s School, is that secondary pupils won’t have to work so hard: “Unconditional offers make it easy for schools to be bad.” This is doubly frustrating considering that the roots of our social mobility problems are found not in higher education – despite the Left’s obsession with who goes to Oxbridge – but in low standards in some schools. The Tories have done their best to return parental choice, discipline, streaming and rigorous exams, but it will all be for nothing if pupils are directed towards universities that are simultaneously becoming easier to get in to. The answers are to go back to proper offers; cut down on the number of places; encourage flexible, part-time and shorter courses; and, most importantly, follow through on the Government’s pledge to increase vocational training.

Esther Mcvey, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has another superb idea: students should be encouraged to get summer jobs. There has been a remarkable, generational decline in young people working while studying. Today, employers routinely complain that while job applicants have nonsense degrees, they lack skills such as timekeeping or team work – and one way to learn them is through newspaper rounds, waiting on tables or manning a shop till. Ultimately it comes down to encouraging personal initiative. The culture of blaming all of one’s problems on society and waiting for the state to come up with a solution breeds complacency.

What young people really need are skills, work experience and to be taught that success in life depends on being willing to work for it.