Value of university

SIR – If a third of graduates are “overqualified for their job” (report, September 12), that does not call into question the value of a university education.

Most British people are overqualified for their jobs. Consider all the shop assistants, cleaners, machinists, restaurant staff, cabbies, van drivers, railway staff, labourers on farms, roads and building sites, call-centre operatives and many others in ordinary occupations. They need to be able to read and write and to carry out straightforward arithmetic. But these skills are taught in primary schools.

What need have they of the chemistry, physics and biology, the geography, history and English literature, the foreign languages, art or music they studied at secondary school level?

If university education can only be justified for its economic benefits, then by the same principle we undermine the whole of secondary education for probably two thirds of the population. The value of education is quite independent of the employment use to which the qualifications gained might be put.

Whatever work someone ends up doing, the opportunity for appreciation of literature and art and science, the reasoning skills and ability to learn which education imparts, are things upon which a civilised society rightly places a high value for their own sake, so that all the people have the opportunity to share the cultural surplus our societies generate. Dr Richard Austen-baker

Abbeystead, Lancaster